How Google Ventures instills design into the heart of its portfolio companies | Hacker News Reader

How Google Ventures instills design into the heart of its portfolio companies

thenextweb.com

37 pointsshakes12 comments

Memphis has a pretty cool "design and marketing help" VC-alike called A>M Ventures. They're the newish investment arm of a local advertising firm and they provide major help to early-stage companies that would otherwise be relying on their own amateur Photoshop skills.

Some of my favorites from their portfolio (n.b. - I know the founders and have worked with some of them):

- http://kufikia.com - Cohort-based dev skills courses with job placements

- http://paytopia.com - Cardless online payments

The am>ventures site is here: http://amventures.co/

We're really happy with the work they've done for us. For early stage startups, they're a great option.

"While this approach may not sound appealing to every startup out there, the design team is clearly a selling point for Google’s VC arm, making it more attractive to promising early-stage startups."

Sure sounds appealing to me. :) This is a big differentiator for GV.

BTW great to see a feature on Ordr.in, I love that startup.

GV has been an amazing partner to ordr.in - this design sprint is the most visible aspect of that amazingness. I totally agree that it is a huge differentiator! (thanks for the love :)

Would be interesting to see what companies (if any) wouldn't want this sort of service. Guessing later stage startups could push back.

Probably startups that don't want to outsource their design and user experience to a giant corporation that genuinely does not care about their users on an individual basis.

The idea-refining sounds invaluable, it really seems unfair to burden that with outsourced ui/ux.

Want to be clear, though, that Google Ventures tries to keep pretty separate from Google. Also, the better GV's portfolio companies do, the better GV does. My impression is that the design team actually cares.

I think the wording of the title is unfortunate, because "instill" sounds sort of pushy and directive. GV makes services like this are available (which is pretty awesome!).

Note: work for google - not GV - and speaking for myself.

Didn't mean that to be negative.

"Huh. Hmm. Put a horizontal bar across the top. That's ok - maybe another one. That feature sounds great - it's horizontal bar can go right under the Google plus's."

I don't see how that process instills design in the company at all. It's just like hiring a design firm to redesign or evaluate the product.

Did you read it? The results = an unfinished mockup. A majority of this process is used to help teach design thinking, so companies can make the right design/usability decisions on their own.

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