The Strategic Importance of Design in Venture Capital

Welcome to Design Is Everywhere, the weekly podcast from the Design Museum. I'm your host Sam Aquilano. I'm the founder and Executive Director of Design Museum Everywhere. Each week on our show we tackle a different element of design and an explore how it impacts our everyday lives. I always have the help of a new guest co host who is an expert in their field and together we interview a guest about their work in design. Because design is everywhere, so are we. This week we're chatting about the intersection of design and venture capital. I'll be joined by Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, and later on we'll chat with James Buckhouse, Design Partner at Sequoia Capital. Together they will share how they elevate the strategic importance of design and story and how they implement them in the world of venture capital. Before we dive in though, I want to recognize three of our most recent Design Museum members. So thank you to Kristen Lajeunais Roach for being a magazine subscriber. Cecile Baron Jensen, another magazine subscriber and so excited to bring on Fresco Design as one of our newest design firm partners. Thank you all. Big thanks to our members. Big thanks to our design firm partners. Your support and involvement makes what we do at Design Museum Everywhere possible. If you're interested in learning more about becoming a member or maybe your design firm wants to become an official partner, visit our website design museum everywhere.org and and click on support. And with that onto this week's topic, the Role of Design in Venture Capital. Venture capital is such a wildly interesting concept and field. I'm excited to learn more and I'm really interested to learn how design plays a role in venture capital and how design can influence the way venture capital works and how VCs work with companies. I am joined by my guest co host this week, Irene Au, to further break down the intersection of design and venture capital. Irene is a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that seeks investments in early stage companies. In addition to Irene's role at Khosla Ventures, Irene is a Adjunct lecturer at Stanford. In courses like Advanced Product Design, Irene built and led the entire user experience and design teams at places like Google, Yahoo, and Udacity. She began her career as an interaction designer at Netscape Communications where she worked on the design of the Internet's first commercial web browser. Irene also teaches yoga at Avalon Yoga center and is a frequent author and speaker on mindfulness practices, design and creativity. Happy to have her. Irene, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks so much. It's been great getting to know you and now I'm happy to have you on the show. So maybe we can start for our audience. Can you break down what venture capital is? And then we'll get into how design plays a role in it.

So venture capitalists, they raise funds that are funded by LPs. They're limited partners. So these are investors in the fund. The venture capitalists go out and they cultivate relationships with entrepreneurs that are trying to solve really difficult problems and build amazing things. Venture capitalists, they vet these deals and they make investing decisions. They decide whether and how much to invest in a company. And sometimes they sit on the boards of these startups and the goal is to help fund and grow and nurture these companies towards a successful exit, which usually means an ipo like going public, maybe it's an acquisition, but we want to grow these businesses so that they can be self sustaining companies that hopefully make a positive impact on the world.

Is there a time horizon that's typical because I feel like sometimes these startups, they're a long way from that IPO or that sustainable model.

Yeah. Usually it takes about 10 years for a fund to pay out. So when you join a venture capital firm, it is kind of like getting married because it is a commitment, because you're not really going to see if these funds are successful or not. You're not going to bear the fruits of your work until much, much later.

Yeah. Wow. And do firms like Khosla have like a particular focus area in terms of which companies they're looking to invest in and build these relationships with, basically get married to?

Well, given that the name of the firm that I work for is named after my boss, Vinod Khosla, it really is fueled by what he is interested in funding. And Vinod likes to support companies that are founded on hard tech, meaning that it's really advanced science and engineering. That's the foundation behind the companies that we fund. That's not necessarily the case for all VC firms, so but that is the case for ours. So for example, we're light on social media or media and entertainment type startups, but we are investing in startups that are doing really interesting crazy things like building a Mach 9 airplane that takes you from New York to London in 90 minutes. Or like, you know, Impossible Foods is another startup that we've invested in. So that gives you a sense for the type of ambition that we like to see in our entrepreneurs.

Let's get into how design plays a role and probably the best way to learn about that is in your role as a design partner, can you talk about what that means and sort of like what's your day to day like?

So I'm an operating partner in most VC firms you'll have the general partners are investing partners and at some VC firms you will also see operating partners. And these are typically people with extensive functional experience in some area, a lot of operating experience inside companies that have grown themselves from startup to successful exit. So my functional area of expertise is in design and user experience obviously. But we also have operating partners who specialize in data science or marketing or Communications or AI. So so our role is to support the portfolio CEOs so that they can be successful. And so that is our ultimate goal is to help these companies be successful given our extensive experience and network and everything else that we bring to the table.

Yeah. So do you in that role in terms of design, do you get involved with the actual design of whatever that maybe not that plane that they're designing, but how deep do you actually get into sort of the work that's being done versus advising, connecting?

I start where they're at. People approach me all the time with a range of problems or issues and I like to meet them where they're at, what is keeping them up at night and help work on problems with them so that we can build a relationship, establish trust and then you know, that creates a foundation for a great relationship working on other kinds of problems going forward. Philosophically like Vinod and I both believe that it's not sustainable to have like people associated with Coastal Ventures doing the actual design work because it doesn't create an incentive for these companies to invest in their own design organizations. My former colleagues over at Google found the same was true over at gv, for example. So like for me my job is not to move pixels around to, for these companies, but they do come to me from time to time and ask me like, what do you think of my design? Or you know, what's wrong with our design because we're having issues with trust or you know, things like that. So that is an opportunity to get into the details. And with that opportunity I use that as a teaching moment. How do I, you know, offer these skills to them so that they can answer these questions on their own in a self sustaining kind of way.

We did a previous episode on design and entrepreneurship and we had Steve Hoffman on and he was saying how important it is for there at least need to be one design founder, you know, co founder in the group. So with these companies that you're investing in and partnering with. Are you seeing design on the team?

Oh yes, absolutely, yes. Many of them try to bring design in from the beginning and if they don't have it, many of them aspire to. I actually spend quite a bit of my time sometimes talking CEOs out of hiring full time design talent in the beginning.

Tell me more.

Because, you know, if you're a small startup that nobody's ever heard of and you're particularly nerdy startup that's just trying to get the technology to work, it is super hard to recruit a designer who's experienced to give up everything they have and join that startup. Sometimes what the company needs is just a website and a brand or they just need like a UI language to start with just to create. Like, and I'm talking this is like early stage, you know, seed funded or they're still trying to find product market fit. You know, that's like two or three people trying to make something. So first of all, it's a terribly hard recruiting challenge. A lot of times the ones that are able to hire design that early in the process they already have some prior relationship with some great designer that they, they know and like and the designer wants to work with them. But if they're coming in cold with no network, it can be super hard. Just like there are a lot of companies out here who have gobbled up a lot of the design talent and they're comfortable. And so, you know, from a designer's perspective, it's like, okay, I have like some big brand on my, you know, like Google or whatever on my resume. It's like, why would I. And there's so much support for designers there. Why would I give that up to go fight the fight and you know, work with some companies nobody's ever heard of and I'm.

And that might not make it right.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, who knows how much they get design and allow me to be successful. I mean, I would argue that as a designer you can make so much more of a difference in a scenario like that.

Sure.

And I think it's exhilarating personally, but not everybody thinks that way. But the other thing too is that like if they, I mean, design is a multidisciplinary field and rarely can you find all the skills that you need to make a company successful in the area of design through just one person. And so if you're a small startup and you have limited resources, most of these startups are just trying to find this like jack of all trades unicorn designer who has it all, you know, user research, interaction design, visual design. You know, they can write well, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just like impossible. So I work with our CEOs to kind of talk through like, what are the real skills that are most crucial for them initially so that it's we're not looking for some impossible dream that is really hard to recruit and hire. Maybe they can start with a freelance designer who helps create the initial visual design language. If it's a more strategic kind of challenge, or if it's the kind of challenge that requires more resources, maybe it makes sense to outsource it and hire a design team like an agency like Metalab or somebody for, you know, three to five months. And then that gives them a nice foundation that they can start with and build and figure out product, market fit. And then once they have this nice brand and they know what they're building, then it becomes much easier to hire full time talent. And it means that they could potentially hire somebody who's less adept at visual design, more focused on like product and interaction design, because there's already a nice visual design foundation laid out. So it's this kind of conversation that we often had. I'm not, you know, it's not a one size fits all. It really depends on the team and, and what they're building. What's the nature of the product that they're building.

Venture capital seems so risky, right? It is these long payoffs and these kind of bets that you make. I wonder if you have another example or case study of a time when maybe design helped minimize risk or make it more palatable risk, if you will.

You know, I don't know how many companies explicitly see this as like, oh, design is a way of mitigating risk. I think more and more we're seeing founders who, who see design as just something that is worth doing. Right. You know, that it's just critical to company success. Rubrik is an example. They're an enterprise company and like Bipolar will say like the number one reason why they have seen the success that they've seen is because they invested so heavily in developing experience that would be simple for users. Like I think a designer was like maybe his second or third employee managed to hire somebody in India who was really fantastic. But he personally, the, the, the founder, Bipol himself personally drove a lot of the vision and principles that led to a simple design. And you know, I think that's kind of something that only a founder can do is to mediate these tough decisions and choices that a company has to make in order to achieve a simple design or a design with a point of view.

Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your expertise. So glad to have you here.

Thanks for having me, listeners.

To see more of Irene's work, visit coastaladventures.com, we'll post a link and Irene, stick around and we'll bring James Buckhouse into the conversation after a quick break.

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That's designmuseumeverywhere.org to be part of this global community. We're back and we're joined by our special guest, James Buckhouse. As Design Partner at Sequoia, James Buckhouse works with founders at every stage as they design their companies, products, cultures and businesses. James got his start in film lensing shots, crafting character arcs and punching up story for movies including the Shrek, Madagascar and Matrix franchises. He regularly lectures on story driven design at Stanford's Graduate School of Business D School. Prior to Joining Sequoia in 2014, James was the Senior Experience Architect at Twitter. James designs revitalize the use of captivating stories and I can't wait to learn more. James, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here.

Yeah, sounds like you've had such a cool career journey. Can you tell us how you moved from film to design and now into venture capital?

So you know every endeavor, every undertaking, every hope, every mystery, every product, every artwork, every romance, every skyscraper, every novel, every film, every chair, every hammer, every automobile, every shopping mall, every every dining hall, every bookshelf, every comic book, every app, every company, every government, every lawsuit, every piece of clothing, every can of dog food, every hand tooled leather saddle, every wedding, every multi billion dollar valuation, every dilapidated warehouse, every city of the future, every graveyard of the past, every childhood dream Every lifetime achievement. I mean, all of this starts with one thing. It starts with story. And sometimes that story inspires nations and millions, and it propels humankind forward. And other times, the story tells a smaller tale, like a process or a product or something that aspires to a more minor, specific transformation. Yet in every case, in every case, every human made object or initiative, there's a story, and the story exists. And so for me, it was. It was always about looking at how to create these tiny machines, these stories that might affect change in the mind of the recipient, whether it was working on a movie or working on a product or working on an art project or working on a ballet. You know, movies, they don't just appear straight from the void, you know, fully fleshed and glossy on your tv, right? Like, what do they start with? They start with a script. And that script starts as a pitch, and that pitch starts as this single sentence called the logline, you know, and all of that starts from ideas, you know, some sort of itch or observation or something inside the writer's brain, the artist's brain, the person's brain that she's desperate to get out in the world. And the same thing with founders. The companies they want to build. They may not think of it as a story. They probably think of it as a problem. And sometimes they don't even think of it as a problem. They think of it as something they can't stand or something they want to solve or an insight that they've had, or some weird twisting moment where they've taken an insight from one field and they've applied it to another. But all of that, in some ways, is a story.

Yeah, I used to, when I taught design, so often my students, just like you said about a movie just showing up, they would think that their role as a designer was just to, like, come up with the final, you know, product, just like that and. And show it to me. And I tried to find like a. A metaphor or analogy. And I said, well, when someone writes a book, right, when they tell a story, they don't just write the final draft and just send it to the printer, right? They prototype, they try things, they write drafts, they get edits. And it sounds like that's how you're seeing this. I'm curious, when you're working with these portfolio companies, how does the role of story or the use of story help them be successful?

Well, what's wild is if you imagine it, imagine it for a second. Imagine your founder, who was the greatest engineer in her entire computer Science department. She's going to walk in there thinking her job is to be the most technically brilliant human on the planet and is going to crush the world with her technical ability. But very soon after starting a business, it isn't really about your own ability to code, it's about your ability to lead. And leadership comes from story. Leadership comes from having everyone see the thing that the world as you see it, to try to create the solution that you're hoping to create. Not just because you've got all the answers, but because you can articulate the problem in a way that everyone's working towards the same, towards the same goal.

We share a common investment in Doordash. And one of my favorite projects that I've seen you work on is this incredible user story. I don't even know what you call it, but if anybody ever goes to the DoorDash office, you'll see a series of animation cells in the cafeteria that I think James was personally responsible for driving. And it's just a beautiful example of how design helps shape a company. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit, James.

Oh, sure thing. So it's called a pxm, a Product Experience Matrix. And it wasn't just me, it was our whole design lab who dug in on this. And frankly the whole Doordash team. And they were at a moment where this was 2016, right? So a while ago, and they were, you know, it was not clear that they were going to be the awesome, you know, they're going to feed the whole nation like they, like they do today, right. They were in the middle of a battle to succeed, right. They were giving it everything that they had and they were trying to work out their story. And so I, you know, I came from dreamworks, I came from making movies. And so we treated their product like a film. And we, we wrote out the character arcs of the drivers, you know, the dashers, we wrote out the character arcs of the families, we wrote out the character arcs of the restaurants, we wrote out the character arc of the, the, you know, customer success person back at Doordash headquarters that's trying to make it all come together. And we wrote these stories out as a team with Doordash's our design team, you know, Doordash's design team and product team and engineering team. But frankly also the C Suite. This was something where the C suite was involved with figuring out what do we want to do here. And we went through the best case scenario and the worst case scenario and we mapped these all out on the wall, like, as if we were storyboarding Matrix 5 or something. And there became this amazing moment when we pinned up all the boards and we started to not just do the horizontal stories, but we started to realize we could group them into vertical stories stories, too. So we'd stack up the stories one across the other, right? So across the top was the family, the diners, their story, and then right underneath it was the dasher story. And then we were looking for moments where they lined up, like when the dasher showed up at the door of the diner's house to deliver the food. And what was wild was how radically different we had drawn the storyboards from the point of view of the dasher and the point of view of the diner, right? Because everyone's got concerns. Everyone's got their own worries. Everyone's got their own hopes and dreams for that moment. You know, how's this going to work out? There's a lot of mystery involved, right? And there's a lot of trust that had to be created right there. And so then we realized, well, wait a minute. The restaurant doesn't disappear from time and space. When. When the dash is there at the door, they're sitting there wondering, well, what just happened? Did I just, like, you know, infinitely expand my reach to as far as you can drive or. Or, you know, did something bad happen there that I'm going to get punished on a review site because of. Of what happened and what can we do? And by the way, a few moments earlier, at another vertical story that was happening back when. Back when the dasher was there at the restaurant picking up the food. Well, that family, that wonderful family trying to get. Get their dinner that night, that family didn't disappear from time and space. They're actually back at home wondering, how's this going? Is this going to work out? And what's wild is, you know, from kind of like a product point of view, there's nothing for the family to do with that moment, right? They don't need. They've already put in what they want. They just got to sit back and wait for it to come. Right? But that is the. The most emotionally vulnerable moment for the family. That is the moment where you've got to, like, reassure the family either. Like, hey, you know, something. Something happened. But don't worry. We're, like, doing everything possible to solve it. Like, it's on its way or, you know, everything is great and it'll be there, like, on time and looking forward to it. The tiniest bit of communication back to the family right there, that's what you're designing for is this story. And you can have this moment where the family is rooting for the dasher to overcome all these problems, right?

You got this.

You got this. You're going to avoid the weird traffic on fourth street and you can go around here where there's no parking and there's this problem here and that problem there. But you can do it. They're rooting for that dasher as if that dasher is the hero in action movie to get the food on time. But what they need is communication every step of the way with that communication then is this like shared bond of trust. And here we go. No communication, no trust though. And then everyone's worried and everyone's upset and everyone's got their guard up and everyone's like convinced, you know, convincing themselves of like horrible worst case scenarios that haven't happened.

Right.

There's just your own fears. The tiniest bit of communication, though, all that goes away. And we're cheering for each other to succeed even when we encounter problems. Problems. And so we call this a product experience matrix where we draw it out like a matrix. But you could think of it as a series of horizontal stories that go right to left that tell the arc of any particular element in that story, a character in that story. But then it's all arranged and rewritten. So there's also these vertical moments. But the structure of this actually comes from Bach. And the way that he would do this amazing trick where you've got the melody going across the top and you're so like, oh, this is the piece, right? That's the main thing. And we've got some accompaniment down there, but who cares? That's just like, you know, filling in the gaps, right? But he would do this most amazing thing where he's got the melody going, but the way he orchestrates the accompaniment is he'll spell out these vertical chords in a way that is going to tell you what the melody is going to be. And then he builds this counter melody in the progression of the harmony that is this second story. And when I first realized, oh my God, there's vertical stories and horizontal stories going on in Bachelor. I've like held that in the back of my mind wanting to find a home for that in other work. Because of course we didn't have matrix structures for even while we're working on the Matrix, right. It's still.

Right.

Strangely. Right. It's a linear story, right?

It's just linear.

It's just Linear, right? Just one story there. But when you have a complex sale or a complex marketplace or a three sided marketplace, or God forbid, a four sided marketplace, which you know can definitely happen, then you just have to start thinking about it from everyone's point of view. So yeah, that's a product experience matrix.

That's so key. Especially as you both know and our listeners know, that the experiences that are coming, whether it's through technology or a pandemic changing how we do things like these are too complicated. They have to be broken down somehow. That sounds like a great approach. I'm curious on how those verticals or those touch points, do those then become design opportunities that kind of fall out of that story?

Absolutely right. You could imagine doing your stand up and the DoorDash team printed this large, right? It's like 40 foot long, like giant mural of this Matrix back in 2016. So it was large and you go have your standups literally standing in front of it. And so as you're looking at that and you're talking about like, okay, we're working on the at the door moment and you're representing the say, the Dasher team and you're saying like, well, here's what the Dasher needs at that moment. It's very natural. Then think about, huh, well, I wonder what the diner needs at that moment too. I wonder what the restaurant needs at that moment because you can see it right in front of you. So for everything that you're working on, you think like, how does this go in the vertical story and how does this go in the horizontal story?

I think it's a really interesting case study too because I think it shows just the contrast in the ways different design partners can contribute to a startup. You know, you had a bunch of questions for me, Sam, earlier about like, how do I get involved with the different portfolio companies? And so like James and I share DoorDash and what he did there with the product experience matrix is just like really unique and special and amazing. And you know, that's not something that I do because it's not in my wheelhouse. So we're very complimentary in that way. With DoorDash, I installed Albert Poon, who was the VP of design there. And in 2018 they came to me and said, oh, we're going to have a product development team off site and we just want you to come speak and talk about how other companies focus on their customers and make their customer experience successful. And what we ended up developing was a workshop where everybody came together. This was like 70 or 100 people. And I facilitated a workshop on how they could become customer obsessed. And we brought in stimulus from like customer support. And they talked about different examples of how customers were really frustrated with X, Y and Z that happened. And James talked about this three sided marketplace and how difficult it was for the doordash team to make their customers happy because everybody was pointing the finger at everybody else. So in this off site they kind of sorted through a lot of the organizational challenges that got in the way of offering a successful customer experience. So I think one of the points I want to highlight here is that a lot of people ask me what does a designer in venture capital do? And there is no singular answer to that question. It's very much kind of dependent on what the firm envisions for what they want this person to do and then also what can this person offer uniquely that enables the startups to be successful and amazing. So it's, it's really unique to the individual. But James, I wanted to know if you had any insights you wanted to share about just being a designer and venture capital. I imagine you have a lot of people approaching you asking how do I get a job like yours or what do you do or you know, how can I become a designer in venture capital? What skills do I need to build that sort of thing? And I'm just curious, like how would you answer that question?

I think I would answer it by starting with something you said a moment ago, Irene, about being customer obsessed. Customer obsessed, competitor aware. And how might we be so profoundly attuned to the needs of the customer that we can do the work that needs to be done? So it's not just about the stuff that I like or this, you know, but, but the stuff that the customer needs. And there's kind of two ways to think about that when you're working in design and venture. One is one customer is the founder. What does the founder need? What's she trying to do? What's her life like? What's, what's delightful, what's miserable, what's difficult, what's awesome, what's going on in her world? And then finally what about her customers? What's going on in their worlds? And so trying to figure out both layers of customer need is where you get to your answer. What does the founder need and what is the founder's customer's needs? We think of these needs as like business problems, right? Like, oh, I've got a business issue and I need my business issue solved. And then sometimes we like stretch that out to some sort of higher order ROI on like you fixed your business problem and that's good for your company, right? Like, you know, so like you could imagine a founder selling to, to a customer and saying like, you know, here's the business problem that you have and don't worry, this is going to be great because it's going to transform. It's going to transform your business and you'll be a hero inside of your business for having this, right? And all of that seems super logical and in fact like that's kind of how we base almost all of our decision making for like what features to have in your product and like how to sell it and stuff. But what's wild is if you imagine this like this kind of like mystic triangle of hope, that's only two, that's only two sides of the triangle, right? Like your business problem, the person trying to solve and then like the, that, you know, the whole organization's like, you know, success, those. There's this other kind of mysterious side to it that no one will talk about, but it's the only one that matters and that's who is the person that that customer is trying to become and how might your product help them take that one step closer to becoming the person they've always wanted to be? And these things are deeply personal and deeply private. They're like, you know, I've been struggling away, like working hard, like you know, you know, hustling and I've been striving for that promotion and maybe, just maybe if I bring this software into my organization, this is going to be the thing that like pushes me over the, the top to like finally get that promotion I think I deserve or it's weirdly even more personal than that. Irene. It's like, it's like I've been battling my sibling my whole life on like getting ahead in like, like literally it's like a personal thing like that. Like I'm going to prove that it like I'm just as good as she is at like doing what I want to do in life. It's literally something like that sometimes. And like maybe this thing is going to be a thing that's going to like help me like look good and be on the cutting edge and cut fit, you know, these weird private longings or I am tired of being the hard worker. I want to be seen as the strategic thinker and this is going to be what helps me like be seen as strategic. In the org, there's always some inner hope or it's this other Thing where you're realizing like, my God, like we can't just work harder, faster and try to like or hire more people and do the old way. If we think we're going to survive, like, we can't just like, like work our way through this problem. We have to have a different way. And my life is miserable just trying to win by working hard, like missing my kids baseball game or missing my, you know, my child's dance recital. Like, that's not the person I want to be. I want to be the, I want to be the human being that is there for the other human beings that I love. And how do I do that? I don't want to be like, you know, the dad that worked hard but never saw his children because, you know, I had an inefficient, like, you know, piece of software. I want to be the human being that both achieves at work and more importantly achieves at what matters, which is caring for the people we love.

Sign me up for that. Where's that software? Because I just would like to buy it. I don't care what it does.

Well, one of them we're using right now, which is Zoom, right? Like the hours saved and the joy brought to families from Zoom. It's very, very real.

I'm curious this for both of you, like what kind of challenges do you face in this work? Is it hard working with founders who have a vision? You know, Irene mentioned that These are like 10 year long engagements. Is it hard to like stay engaged? What are you facing? And I'm curious how you sort of overcome these challenges.

I think one of the everything has a duality to it, so you can perceive it as a positive or a negative. Right. I would say one of the things I miss from my previous corporate life that I don't feel I have as much in venture capital is the sense of team and working that closely with others. In venture capital, you're advising, mentoring, coaching, you're in a liminal space and these founders can take it or leave it. In terms of the advice that you're giving, that is also true actually as a designer in some ways though, because you're not actually writing code. So I also say I had to give up those dreams a long time ago, but those skills actually transferred over very nicely to being a designer and venture capital in that sense because it just forces you to be better in terms of your ability to facilitate and convince and inspire people.

For me, the biggest challenge is how do I connect the founders to each other. And that was kind of the big, the big insight that I finally had, what is it wasn't really about lecturing to founders or like teaching them how to do stuff. It was about recognizing, you know, identifying, listening to what their core challenges were and then connecting them to each other so that they could work through them. And then, you know, digging into our archive because we've got what, 49, 50 years worth of, like, case studies in our archive of founders that have gone through these challenges, connecting them also to the archive to figure out, like, what have different founders of years past done to try to face these same challenges. And so the idea of connecting them to each other and finding the right matches so that they might work with each other, that's been the big insight I think, for me in the last couple of years. Straight up challenge, though, is just design hiring right now. Right? Like, because of course, what people really want is designers on their team. And so let's get them some designers. There's a real demand for designers right now, now, real demand.

So I'm thinking about the design founders out there. I was one of them, still am. But the ones who are, like, just getting started, they're in the trench. Not advice on how to get funded through venture capital, but advice on how to, like, keep pushing and keep owning their idea and trying to get to some level of, you know, sustainability.

I think what sets successful founders apart from others is a couple of things. One is they have to have a really great vision and story to go along with that, to recruit and bring a whole team of people along with them, because other people have to believe in this and imagine that this is possible, to want to join this person, to go make this vision a reality. I also think that founders, successful founders are really flexible and diverse in their thinking. They can adopt the perspectives of, of multiple stakeholders and, you know, interests. So it's not just from a design perspective or the customer perspective, but it's also business, engineering, sales, et cetera. So that's not to say that they need to go collect degrees in all of this on all, in all these areas, but they need to have enough fluency to be able to lead effectively. Because if you're founder, ultimately your job is to be the decider. You're making choices between varying points of view and stakeholders. So it does require a level of fluency. The nice thing about being a designer is that by nature we have to be flexible in our thinking and we have to adopt a lot of different points of views. So we already have a nice foundation for those key ingredients. And then there's the element of grit and persistence. You know, just this idea of like constantly making and putting stuff out there and trying and getting feedback and iterating. I mean, we say it like it's, you know, I mean, this is like motherhood and apple pie because that's the nature of design thinking. But it's actually incredibly hard for a lot of people. Like even just to make stuff is hard, but then to like make, put it, put it out there and be vulnerable and to get feedback, it's really hard to receive that feedback sometimes and then to reflect on what can I do better. But those are life skills that are crucial and especially critical for being a successful founder.

I really enjoyed hearing you say that. Right. This idea of being able to fall in love with the problem that you're trying to solve, not necessarily the solution you have in mind. This ability to have an open heart to the problems of your customers or your potential customers, that's really important. Here's some tactical and practical stuff that can actually help. So by the way, if you ever are actually trying to pitch, we have an article on the 10 stories you need to know in order to pitch. But it's like, what's your company purpose? What's your problem? What's your solution? Why now? What's the market potential? What's the competition or alternatives? What's the business model? What's your team like? You know, financials, have you got any? And what's your vision? Right. And you know, those are kind of like the 10, like basics, basic stories you got to have in a deck. And that's sometimes a helpful prompt to think through and what to do. But, but who cares about that? Let's talk about the actual idea. You know, is this an idea that's worth turning into a company or do you need to still iterate? Is this, you know, is this a big problem? Is this not just a problem for some people, but this is a problem for lots of people, right? Do you have a, do you have a solution that's different, not merely better? If it's a tiny bit better than what everyone else is doing, are they really going to like, take the risk to like, stop what they're doing to do your thing? Well, what if your thing's a lot better? Are they still going to do it? Well, maybe not, but if your thing is different, they see you as a way to transform themselves into the person they want to become. Well, that's pretty interesting. That's actually something that the customer can get excited about and want to want to do. I would encourage design founders out there who are, who are thinking about, do I want to turn this into a business to think about how is my thing different, not merely better than what everyone else is doing. And it's that difference is that that is not only going to set you up on like how what your whole go to market is going to be, but it's also going to be in the end, the, the whole reason why people, why people want to support you, what people want to become your customer, what people want to get involved. And then lastly, here's a weird thought that I just want to. How do you get to that difference? How do you. How do you do that? Right? It's not just think, be weirder than the other person. Like, that's just like. Although that's fun, right? I quite enjoyed that in our school. That was a good time for me. What do you do? And so I started digging in on this, actually. I started doing research into like, are super interesting companies like that had weird ideas what was going on, right? And there was this kind of concept that kept coming up over and over, which I nicknamed the outsider's insight. And the outsider's insight goes like this. You observe something in one field of study, like something interesting, something from one particular field that's like unique to that field, where everyone's iterating away in that field and they're trying to do that thing in that field because that's where that thing belongs to. And then you imagine transporting it to a different field and then you see what happens to your new field when that thing occurs. And so my favorite example of this is carbon3d now just called carbon3d printing company. Right? Well, okay. Everyone else thought of 3d printing as this mechanical engineering process. And they're just iterating away, getting a little better at the. But it wasn't even really 3D printing, right? It was like 2D printing over and over and over in these layers that are brittle and awful and. And, you know, just merely prototypes and are slow, super slow, right? There are mushrooms. There are mushrooms that grow faster than those. Those parts get printed, right? And so the founders of Carbon looked at that. They're not mechanical engineers. They were chemists and material scientists. And they said, this is crazy. Why are we. Why not do it like this? And they were watching, they were watching Terminator 2, and there's a scene in that when the T1000 rises up out of the chromatic puddle of goo to become like the robot man, right? And they said, oh, My God, if we did that, we could change manufacturing forever. And so their whole process is like they use light and oxygen to freeze and thaw and cook and extrude parts that turn out to be 100x faster or whatever, the normal mechanical engineering approach. But what's wild is that their idea was different. They took this outsider's insight, applied it, an insight from one field to another, and totally turned it on its ear and made a whole new thing. So if you're a designer out there, you have the advantage of being able to investigate different fields, look for things that are interesting, imagine applying them to a different field to see how you might be able to make some change.

Thank you both. I love this conversation. So fun. James, thanks for being here, sharing your passion, expertise. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, listeners.

To see more of James work, check out sequoiacap.com okay, it's that time. Every week we share our weekly dose of good design, our examples of good, thoughtful design that have impacted us or others in a meaningful way. I'll go first. I and I'll say Amor had an amazing idea to share some of the weekly doses from our staff at Design Museum Everywhere. So today I am sharing a weekly dose from our marketing director, Maria Vilafranca. She comes at us with these Muji 0.38 millimeter pens. Yes. Irene's nodding, which are very fine point, but incredibly smooth to write with. They have no ink blots, regardless of what angle you hold the mat. Maria says they're beautiful to look at, and she often forgets to cap them. And they don't dry out. Maria also says a friend gave me one early in the pandemic and I literally can't use anything else. So that's ours from the staff. That comes from Maria. Thank you, Maria. That's the Muji 0.38 millimeter pens. Irene, what about you?

I have those said pens and I'm a pen nerd myself, so, you know, he's one of my favorites. Yes. So my favorite design of the week is the Salt Lake City airport. I just went there for the first time because I got a new puppy.

Nice.

And I had to go there. This airport just opened last year, I think, and it's gorgeous on the inside, but beyond the visuals, it's highly functional as well. So, like, as you navigate through the airport, the second signage is really clear. You know, like when you're walking to your gate, it actually shows the name of the city in the biggest font and then the flight number so as opposed to like a three gate, which they do have, what you're looking for is the name of the city that you're flying to. One thing I love about the airport is the design of the bathrooms. So just imagine yourself, like, as you're traveling, you've got your carry on that, the roller bag, and you're trying to negotiate yourself into a bathroom stall. And it's like, okay, well, the distance from the swinging door to the toilet, there's not enough room to squeeze my body in. And the suitcase, so how do I negotiate this? And I don't want to just leave my suitcase outside of the stall. They actually thought about this when they designed the airport. So the depth of the stall is deep enough so that you can go all the way in, bring your suitcase in enough to clear the swinging door, and then close the door. I mean, it's just. And these are the little details that make sense. So much of a difference. It's the difference between stress and joy. To me, that just exemplifies great design. So, yeah, Salt Lake City Airport. Love it.

Gotta fly through there. Listeners, if you have a great weekly dose to share, you can always share it with me and I'll put it on the air, tweet or share it with me on Twitter. Amaquilano. Irene, thanks for being here. I love this conversation.

Thanks for having me.

That's our show. I want to again thank Irene Au and James Buckhouse for joining us, and thank you all for listening. We'll post links to the resources we discussed today on our episode page. So just go to designmuseum everywhere.org and on the right menu, click on podcast. You can always find the latest from us at the Design Museum on social media. On Twitter, we're esignmuseum. And then on Instagram, we're at Design Design Museum Everywhere. You can also search us out on LinkedIn and Facebook as well. Plus, we have an awesome email newsletter. Goes right to your inbox. Always get the latest news from us. Check that out. You can sign up at the bottom of our website and please be sure to rate, review and subscribe to Design is Everywhere. Anywhere you listen to podcasts. Your ratings and your reviews really help us reach more people so we can keep talking about the transformative power of design every week. This episode was written, edited and produced by Amor Yates. Our theme music is Orange Sunset by One Wave. For the whole team here at Design Museum Everywhere, thanks for being here and we'll talk again next week.