The Designer Fund will invest in startups where the founders are designers | Hacker News Reader

The Designer Fund will invest in startups where the founders are designers

thedesignerfund.com

62 pointsthankuz27 comments

As a designer, I have to say this is great news. But it's probably easier to build a startup as a programmer with no design experience than as a designer with no development experience.

So it will be interesting to see how the funded companies manage to actually build their product.

Actually, I think this is fantastic due to the fact that there are brilliant designers with great ideas - and while it was hard to find developers to become technial co-founders with simply a design - now they can show they have some funding which may push the devs over the cliff.

Further - it would be interesting if the fund adds development resources to the offering.

For example - they could hire full time devs to help the funded designers get prototypes up and running in lieu of further cash.

This would be a great type of incubator who works as an enabling tech boutique.

But for me the key question is – as a designer, how will you convince investors to fund you? With just an idea? With your portfolio? With a business plan and strategy?

Well, since that is just a landing page, and appears to be founded by one of the guys behind 500 startups -- I think i will be a matter of having a good idea, having a sound design for implementing that idea and getting them to believe that if you were empowered with funding you could see that idea, based on your design developed.

I belive that having a good idea/design and the credibility of some funds behind you, you should be able to pay/convince a tach co-founder to work with you.

What would really be of value, as I mentioned, would be if this incubator provided you with some development hours. Further it would be great if they provided good development estimations based on your design.

So then they could say "You idea and design should cost about $XXX to get it to stage 1 2 or 3"

Stages 1 2 and 3 being, MVP, Beta, Market respectively.

Carbonmade was started by my co-founder and designer, Dave Gorum. Harvest, a startup also in our building in NYC, was founded by two designers as well. It's fairly common in NYC.

Thank you all for the comments, questions, and feedback... it's not about me, Dave McClure, any individual designer in residence or even 500 Startups, it's about creating an ecosystem of great designer founders and designers with specialized talent in the startup game.

And we want more but the startup designer path is broken. Just look at the thousands of responses on Quora for hints... I don’t even have to ask and bet that many of your companies are looking to hire a designer.... but the problem is, designers are being taught outdated education, not being mentored by other startup designers, and there’s intense competition. If you think the problem is bad here, it gets worse globally.

We see this trend growing as more consumer startups are succeeding because of replicable methods for great core product idea discovery and continuously well executed user experience, not just pretty pixels. In fact we’ve invested in a number designer founders including Votizen’s Jason Putorti, ColourLovers (also YC), WorkersNow, Slideshare, Forrst, Foodspotting, Punchd, MotionMath, Visual.ly...

So the question is how do we create more designers like Jason Putorti, who not only have the more traditional visual ability to make things look pretty, but more importantly have the engineering and development skillz along with business sense to effectively launch startups and be successful.

This begs the follow up question, so where do these great designers go? Many of my top designer friends are at agencies and big tech companies where they hone their craftsmanship and are respected. However, too few take the leap to venture out on their own and become founders/leaders, even when they get frustrated being mercenaries and trading their time for cash that doesn’t scale...but some actually risk leaving the cush job...

Like consultants from Adaptive Path. On their website they actually embrace designers like Jeff Veen who sold his company to Google and Ryan Freitas one of our mentors, who sold his company to AOL. So how can we create an environment for folks like this to take the entrepreneurial leap...

They can take The d.fund path. We aim to remove this activation barrier with hand pick designers from top schools, tech companies, freelancers, even globally, to help foster a new generation of designer founders. In the process we also will create more designers available for hire and develop specialized design consulting for startups as a means to train and stay alive, not an end.

We’ve been growing up & to the right with hand picked and filtered designers by being radically collaborative with other groups and internally teaching our own design bootcamp and curriculum inspired by the Stanford dschool, Janice Fraser’s LUXr and the whole lean startup movement. We also plan to host an even better WarmGun conference to bring together more designers and developers later this year in NYC...

More top designers are joining our community everyday because it’s not about Dave, me or any one designer in residence...it’s about a scalable designer ecosystem that is committed to helping produce designers that solve meaningful problems in our world, not one trick ponies & pseudo attention sucking innovation...

Many of you may have seen the YC post that got thousands of views about how it’s like the Marines...which makes me wonder what happens when you combine an empathetic Jedi Designer with an elite Marine Hacker...I think you get an amazing force of real innovation....

So, help create the best path for startup designers by joining us and not just investing at least $50k in a designer founder to participate in our next accelerator batch in Mid May, but more importantly... provide the education, mentorship & especially engineering skills to make the startup designer ecosystem healthy & sustainable...

How about funding where founders (3) are

1. understands/responsible for design.

2. understands/responsible for technology development.

3. understands/responsible for business development.

Edit - I personally do not agree to have artificial requirements of "one founder must be designer" or such sorts (including the above mentioned) for creating innovating/successful startups.

I also agree with this. Why not have requirements like "One founder must be 6'2" tall"? Okay, it's not exactly the same, but I think the analogy is somewhat reasonable. There are many skills required in order to start a successful business, and I question whether design skills are anywhere in there. I think having a requirement that a founder for a design business must have some design experience (either formal or not) is a reasonable thing.

It also occurs to me now that a "designer" could mean just about anything. A game designer to found a game company? That sounds good. A hardware designer to found a new hardware-oriented technology firm? Also good. A graphic designer to found a graphic design studio? Yeah, that sounds great too!

If you target everybody, you target nobody.

They're segmenting a crowded market (on both the investor and entrepreneur sides of the market), investing in founders they understand, and I wish them luck with their new niche.

Nordstrom's doesn't sell 2x4s. Lowes doesn't sell evening gowns. Non-designer founders don't launch from The Designer Fund. It'll be fun to see how this hypothesis works in practice.

Totally agree. Some of the most influential "design" companies of the past decades weren't actually started by designers. Apple, Mint, etc. are renowned for their beauty, elegance, and design foresight, but that's just because their leaders had great taste not actual design skills.

Could you explain the difference between "understands design" and being a designer?

I like the color green.

What's the definition of a designer?

I am a recent CS grad who is making an HTML5 Canvas games site in my spare time. I'm doing everything myself so it is taking a long time.

I have never used Ruby or Rails before this project. I only recently learned Canvas and Javascript.

I have however done site design before and done art all my life. I am probably going to end up doing the layout of my site as well as all the artwork for (at least) the first game.

Am I a designer?

If you are a designer, you know it. Doesn't hold the other way though ("knowing" is required but not sufficient).

I think it's great to encourage designers to be founders. The arguments against commodification of design (i.e. crowdsourcing) usually include that it "devalues design."

I think more designers should take advantage of the incredible value they can create – practically for free – by being entrepreneurs instead; instead of worrying about clients that "don't understand the value of good design."

Very good idea. I'm starting to really see the meaning behind "all you need is an angle". I guess you can recycle virtually anything.

Sounds great, but I'd really like to more information and some demonstration of value before I sign up for some email list.

The language of the signup page, "Sign up if you want to help" also seems aimed more at people who want to help them, rather than designers who want to get funded.

I couldn't agree more. Without a tangible list of how I could even possibly be benefited, you probably are not getting my email. Even just telling me your going to send out newsletters would be enough.

This is a great idea. We designers are very confident about creating, designing and executing an idea with a great visual look and user experience not so much build it. So this will be a great opportunity to fund beautiful looking projects.

They'd be better off rephrasing the question on the front page "what do these companies have in common" to "what do these products have in common." Android is not a company.

At a cursory look, this reminds me of the hedge fund-of-funds (right before the big bust) that marketed itself as only investing in funds that were managed by women.

To my knowledge that's still around. I've heard that the prominent reason some funds tout themselves as woman-led is because some studies showed that women tended to get consistent although smaller returns then men-led funds. Had to do with not taking big risks and making more calculated decisions. This is all anecdotal of course.

From whois - Enrique Allen registered domain. According to his linkedin / crunchbase profile he is a Stanford researcher / TA, and founding member 500 startups. Sounds interesting.

Also, http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/06/500-startups-designer-fund...

Edit: thanks for correction. Sincere apologies for silly oversight.

Enrique = he. And he is cool - he's the designer-in-residence at 500 Startups and a very chill guy to talk to.

He's a friend of mine, and he was making things happen at fbFund and Venrock's incubator even before 500 Startups was a thing. I'm excited to see what kind of inaugural class he lines up.

When the founder starts with an innovation in user experience, good things usually happen.

I assume this means product designers and is not explicitly just for graphic designers.

graphic design != product design

I'm excited about this fund, unless they are just looking for graphic artist founders explicitly.

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