“Instead of doing one little pixel at a time, we should build the infrastructure that engineers use to create new features”: How Sierra designs with AI

Following the launch of our AI in Design 2026 report, we’ve been spending time with the design teams behind the products shaping tech, including Linear, Stripe, and Notion, to understand how AI is changing the way they design and build. We’re excited to start sharing those case studies with you.

First up: Sierra, the startup building AI agents for enterprise customer experiences.

Read the full case study

Co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, Sierra has quietly become one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies ever, crossing $200M in ARR in just over two years. But behind that hyper-growth is an incredible creative constraint: Sierra’s design team is just a handful of people supporting an engineering organization nearly twenty times its size.

Keeping pace requires a completely different mindset when AI acts as such a massive force multiplier for code. Sierra’s designers simply cannot personally touch every product decision anymore. Instead, they’ve had to completely rethink their leverage. As designers Wayne Fan and Nick Hiotis put it, the focus has shifted from polishing every feature themselves to building the systems, patterns, and components that allow hundreds of engineers to ship high-quality UI on their own.

At the same time, the team is highly protective of their craft. While AI has made building those technical foundations incredibly fast, they are intentionally keeping certain parts of their process slow, human, and unautomated.

Key takeaways from Sierra’s case study

1. Shrink the distance between idea and reality

The faster you can test an idea, the less time you waste debating hypotheticals. This is massive for Sierra because their product is incredibly data-dense. A layout might look flawless in Figma, only to completely break the moment it hits real-world data. Wayne laughs about finishing a Figma file that “looked sick,” only to see it in a working prototype and have to apologize to his engineer.

So, they shifted their workflow. Instead of treating Figma as the ultimate source of truth, they use it for quick, rough concepts, then immediately jump into Cursor to build a prototype with real data. Within hours, they know if an idea actually holds up.

Wayne calls the new rhythm: “Cook, prototype, be wrong, go back”... all before lunch.

2. Scale design by building systems, not screens

When AI first made it easy for designers to write production code, the team’s gut instinct was to just fix things themselves. They have a Slack channel where engineers post design nits, and Wayne would jump in with Claude to tidy them up. He’d point to a weird spacing issue, type “I don’t like this, fix it,” and it was done.

But he quickly realized that didn’t scale. “Instead of helping 50 engineers level up their craft, taste, and consistency, if I’m doing all the polish myself, I’m really just the 51st engineer,” Wayne says. He was treating the symptom, not the cause. “That’s not a good use of my time at all, even though it seems intoxicating and so satisfying to do.”

There was another side effect: the healthy friction that usually sharpens a designer’s judgment was disappearing. Instead of debating why a specific component or layout worked better, it became too easy to just accept the AI’s first suggestion and move on. “The muscle building on trying to dial into quality is kind of lost,” Wayne notes. “It’s being subcontracted out.”

That realization changed how the team approaches their role:

“If we can touch production code and the systems more easily with stuff like Claude or Cursor, what is a designer’s role in trying to empower at scale? Instead of doing one little pixel at a time, we should build the infrastructure that engineers use to create new features.”
- Wayne Fan, Product Designer at Sierra

Take their data tables. By last December, the product had accumulated around 18 different versions of the same pattern, each solving a slightly different problem. Instead of adding yet another review cycle, the team consolidated them into a flexible table component with sorting, search, pagination, and extended it per team as needs came up.

This idea of building shared foundations is a philosophy that goes beyond design at Sierra. The engineering team recently wrote about consolidating role-specific AI agents into a single company-wide agent for the same reason: the biggest gains come when improvements compound across the organization, rather than helping only one person or team.

Sierra’s designers scale their impact by looking across the product and spotting places where shared foundations could help teams build faster and more consistently. As Nick puts it: “We have to be extremely horizontal, aware of all the different services and features coming up, things being built. Recognizing patterns is a muscle we’ve had to become really good at.”

3. Protecting craft on purpose

All that said, some things are still very much worth making by hand.

Sierra runs two agents that work alongside each other: Explorer, the agent-optimizing agent, and Ghostwriter, the agent-building agent. When CEO Bret Taylor asked for a set of icons for them, Wayne and Nick built a small visual system - a compass rose as the anchor for anything AI in the product - and worked through sparkles and a Lego-minifig-style face before landing on a ghost for Ghostwriter.

Then, they obsessed. They spent two solid hours staring at a 16×16 grid, debating exactly how many squiggles a ghost needs to feel alive. Once the static asset was perfect, they animated it in Cursor so its eyes subtly drift around and its body morphs while it “thinks.”

Was it efficient? Absolutely not. But it brought back the joy of why people get into design in the first place.

“You look up and realize hours have passed,” Nick says, “and you’re like, wow, that felt so rewarding. I did not use my time the most efficiently. And how great was that?” He calls these “moments of joy,” the details that keep design from becoming a boring loop of typing a prompt and picking an output.

The ghost became a mascot - people put stickers of it on their laptops, and it gave the team something to rally around. “It could’ve been a pencil,” Nick says, “but do people want to rally around a pencil? Having a mascot, a sense of personality, is worth the heartache and the sweating of the pixels.”

As AI makes building easier, Sierra’s story is a reminder that the details worth obsessing over often aren’t the ones that save the most time. Spending an extra hour drawing something by hand or chasing a weird idea is often exactly what turns a purely functional product into one people actually love.

Explore the full case study

What we’re reading

• How tech workers are feeling in 2026. AI is creating a strange divide: some people feel amplified by it, while others feel less sure about where they fit. Lenny Rachitsky’s latest survey found that designers and researchers are among the groups feeling the most anxiety about AI’s impact.

• What happens when the terminal becomes your canvas? Pablo Stanley puts into words (and illustrations) how it feels to work this way, and why designing used to feel “more playful. Less optimized and robotic. Less shadcn and more color. Less inter/geist and more typefaces I had recently fell in love with…it had more of me in it.”

• Design has been too settled for too long. Andy Budd unpacks our AI in Design report and a shift we’re seeing across the industry: As designers take on more product and engineering work, the question becomes less “who owns design?” and more “how do teams make better decisions when everyone can build?”

• Paper went all-in at Config for their first real marketing push, featuring 3,000 branded coffee cans, ten wrapped taxis, two LED trucks circling Moscone, even custom claw machines, all designed in their own product and built in-house.

Open design roles

• Product Designer and Design Engineer at Paper (Remote)

• Design Engineer at Ambrook (SF, Denver, NYC, Remote)

• Motion Designer, Experiential at Stripe (SF, NYC, Seattle)

• Design Engineer at New Generation (SF)

• Senior Product Designer at Via (SF, NYC)

• Architectural Designer at Primer (Remote)

• Product Designer at DICE (London)

• Senior Product Design Manager at Gusto (SF, NYC)

• Product Designer at Tracksuit (Sydney)

• Head of Brand at Primer (SF)

Explore 1,000+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you’d like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

Fearn just announced their $5.5M seed, led by Kindred Ventures with Designer Fund, a16z speedrun, and Essence VC participating. We’re proud to be backing them, and we’re using the moment to make a broader case: the most valuable design work in the economy is hiding in the industries designers tend to avoid.

A call for design-minded founders in regulated industries

We’ve noticed a pattern where designers gravitate toward spaces where great design is easily visible and users already have taste. That’s one reason so many designer-led companies have emerged in consumer software, creative tools, and workplace products, areas where we’ve backed companies like Notion, Framer, and Linear.

But the biggest design gaps in the economy are in regulated industries: patents, insurance, healthcare billing, compliance, government services. In these domains, prices are unpredictable, timelines are long, and documents arrive that ordinary people can’t evaluate. None of this is an accident of bad design. It’s the absence of design altogether, in the places where people can least afford it.

If you’re design-minded and building in these industries, let us know. We’re looking to back the next Stripe, Gusto, or Omada Health.

The design opportunity, right now

LLMs are remarkably good at pattern-matching and sifting through massive amounts of information. Work that once justified weeks of expert billing can now be done in minutes, which means the old experience is no longer the only option, and founders who prioritize design have an edge.

Every major AI conversation right now, services becoming software, agents doing professional work, models commoditizing, points at the same conclusion: the hard part has shifted from whether the work can be automated to whether the result can be trusted and understood. That is a design problem, and it’s the one Fearn’s cofounders Han Kim and Angela Gao set out to solve.

What this looks like in patent law

Patent systems are first-to-file, which makes the priority date everything. Elite, expensive in-house IP teams are proactive. They know how to file effectively and can turn an invention into a filing within 48 hours. Everyone else is at the mercy of external firms that are slow, reactive, and expensive, waiting weeks with little visibility and an invoice they couldn’t have predicted.

Fearn rebuilds that experience with modern tooling that’s actually easy to understand. You upload your invention notes and preview a complete draft in minutes, one you can read and question before you commit to anything. Former Big Law practitioners and PhDs review every application. What used to take 50+ hours takes about 20 minutes.

If you want the highest-quality patents built for the AI age, try Fearn

Design as a differentiator

When Ben and Han first met, they actually spent the entire call talking about keyboard form factors (Han prefers a split keyboard) and beautifully designed products, before getting into the patenting experience as it stands. This is not the obvious first conversation between a VC and a founder in patent law, but a good window into how Han thinks.

Fearn names “craft” as a company value and defines it as caring about every detail, from claim language to figure formatting. That sounds like branding copy until you use the product and see it built the same way: models trained to get the tedious details provably right, and a draft you can preview and question before paying.

Just as Han believes the experience of a traditional keyboard sucks, he also believes the experience of both drafting and initiating a patent leaves a lot to be desired.

Why we invested

What convinced us is the architecture underneath. The first wave of legal AI was wrappers: thin products on top of general-purpose models, impressive in a demo and unreliable in practice. The consequences are now public. Courts sanctioned lawyers six figures in the first quarter of this year alone for AI-fabricated citations. In most software, an AI mistake costs you an awkward answer. In patents, it can cost you the patent.

Regulated industries and the future of design

At Designer Fund, we’ve believed for a decade that when a foundational technology matures, value moves up the stack to product and design. AI has reached that point. The models are converging, the capability is broadly available, and the differentiation is shifting to the experience. The industries with the worst experiences have the most to gain.

So consider this a call to action. If you’re a designer or design-minded founder, point your craft at the industries everyone complains about and nobody redesigns.

A few we think are wide open:

• Insurance

• Healthcare billing

• Tax and accounting

• Legal contracts and compliance

• Government benefits and licensing

• Banking and lending compliance

• Clinical trials and pharma regulatory

• Accounting and audit

• Real estate

If you’re building in one of these spaces, we want to meet you. And if you want the highest-quality patents for the AI age, try Fearn.

Fearn did this for patents. There are a hundred more industries waiting.

Congrats to Han, Angela, and the whole Fearn team.

More from Designer Fund companies

Joyful Health raised a $22M Series A to help healthcare providers recover revenue lost in the claims process. Combining AI with expert operational support, the platform identifies reimbursement breakdowns, investigates denials, and helps providers collect payments for care they’ve already delivered.

The Path launched publicly, introducing an AI-powered therapy and coaching platform designed to prioritize outcomes and safety. Built by a founding team of early employees at Calm and now Tony Robbins, the company will work to expand access to high-quality mental healthcare using AI.

Gusto introduced Cofounder, an AI teammate built to help small businesses handle operational work. It can run payroll, flag compliance deadlines, manage time-off requests, and work through familiar channels like Slack and text message.

Open design roles

Standout design roles from across our portfolio:

• Brand Designer, Growth at Air (NYC)

• Design Engineer (Contract) at Ambrook (Remote, US)

• Product Designer and Builder at Ambrook (SF, Denver, NYC, Remote)

• Staff Designer at Dupe (NYC)

• Senior Product Design Manager at Gusto (NYC, SF)

• Senior Staff Service Designer at Gusto (Multiple Locations, US)

• Principal Product Designer at Linear (Remote, Europe)

• Design Engineer at New Generation (SF)

• Staff Product Designer at Omada Health (Remote, US)

• Product Designer at Primer (SF)

• Lead Creative, Design at Ro (NYC)

• Product Designer, Dashboard at Stripe (SF)

• Creative Director, Brand Experiences at Stripe (Chicago)

• Video Marketing Design Intern at The Mind Company (Remote, US)

Explore 1,000+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you’d like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

One of the narratives around AI and design in tech is that designers are getting squeezed out—that as software becomes easier for anyone to build, designers matter less.

The data we’ve uncovered in our second annual AI in Design report points to a more nuanced shift. Designers are owning more and shipping more. But they’ve also gone up a layer of abstraction to become builders. They’re not just producing deliverables—they’re spinning up new design tools to produce them. They’re inventing systems that help their companies harness more creative potential of non-designers and designers alike.

We believe this is the start of a foundational shift in how work gets done and how companies see their people. And it’s happening fast. In the year since our 2025 report, weekly AI usage for design tasks has jumped from 54% to 91%, and 75% use it daily. But the most significant changes have been qualitative. Last year was about early experimentation. Now, AI has spread into all parts of the design process—and brought designers into areas that most didn’t touch, like coding, prototyping, and accessing business data at scale to influence decisions.

We explore these themes and more in AI in Design 2026, created by Designer Fund and Foundation Capital. The report draws on a survey of more than 900 designers across 60+ countries, 25+ in-depth interviews, and case studies with the design teams at Anthropic, Framer, Linear, Notion, Shopify, Sierra, and Stripe. Each video goes inside their workflows, the tradeoffs they’re navigating, and how they’re operating differently now. If you’d like to be notified as they’re released, sign up here.

For design leaders wondering how others are running their teams, we want to shine a light and help you ask the right questions for the path ahead. For designers, we share what advanced builders are creating and what managers are looking for in candidates now.

Read the AI in Design 2026 report

And even as we surfaced patterns, we found that attitudes and behaviors vary widely by company and by individual. Depending on where you sit in the industry, these findings may feel surprising, validating, or somewhere in between. Our goal with this research is to bring more clarity to a conversation that’s evolving incredibly quickly.

Below are a few findings from the full report that we want to highlight. You can also read Fast Company’s coverage of the research.

Designers are becoming builders

Half of the designers we surveyed—across product and brand design, not just design engineers—said they’ve shipped AI-generated code to production.

We’re now moving from “should designers code” to “when and how should designers code?” AI tools are lowering the barrier for designers to prototype, build, and ship ideas themselves.

One of the more surprising findings was that leaders and managers are shipping code as much as (and sometimes more than!) individual contributors. Many described using AI tools to quickly prototype ideas, test workflows, or move projects forward without waiting on engineering bandwidth.

We also saw continued movement away from static deliverables. Prototypes are becoming a more central design output, and in some teams they’re replacing mockups altogether.

And more designers, especially at enterprise companies, are building their own custom tools. They’re inventing microtools to automate manual work, creating the design software they’ve always wished they had, and orchestrating agentic workflows that let non-designer teammates create on-brand work using prebuilt design system components.

The toolstack is expanding and fragmenting

The average designer in our survey now uses 7 off-the-shelf AI tools regularly, more than double last year’s average of 3. That doesn’t include the internal tools many teams are building themselves.

Rather than converging around a single “standard” workflow, design stacks are becoming more personalized and fluid. Teams are stitching together different models, prototyping tools, and coding environments depending on the task and how they like to work.

When we asked what challenges designers face when using AI in their workflow, the most common answer was “unreliable output quality.” Output quality is also the single most important factor in whether an AI tool becomes part of a designer’s regular workflow.

Roles are continuing to merge

65% of designers said they’re taking on more product or engineering responsibilities, while 40% said the reverse is also happening: PMs and engineers are contributing more to design work. As designers move closer to code and prototyping, traditional role boundaries are continuing to blur, with product development becoming more shared across disciplines.

But that increase in overlap doesn’t always translate to closer collaboration, both within design teams and across product orgs. Last year, only 5% of respondents said collaboration had decreased because of AI. This year, that number rose 4x to 20%.

Several designers described a shift toward more solo work: spending more time in prompting and in terminals, and less time in live back-and-forth with teammates. Work is moving faster, but some of the connective tissue of collaboration hasn’t kept pace.

What design leaders are hiring for

50% of the leaders we surveyed said they’re placing greater emphasis on AI fluency when hiring, followed closely by systems thinking and strategic skills. Compared to a few years ago, there’s less focus on narrow specialization and more demand for designers who can navigate ambiguity, connect disciplines, and shape direction.

Part of that shift comes from how AI is changing the design process. As tools become more integrated into product development, designers are increasingly expected to operate across the full arc of creation, moving from strategy to prototyping to execution with more fluidity. Several leaders described designers as “orchestrators”: people who can guide workflows and translate ideas into outcomes.

At the same time, stronger tools haven’t lowered the bar for quality. Only 5% of leaders surveyed said they’re placing less emphasis on execution quality. If anything, many argued that taste, judgment, and the ability to uphold a high standard matter even more now that AI makes it easier for anyone to generate “good enough” outputs.

Expectations are changing faster than company policy

73% of designers say they feel rising expectations around output, quality, and speed. Yet only 28% of leaders say their companies have made formal updates to evaluation, comp, or hiring. Just 8% have changed performance metrics, and only 4% have adjusted compensation structure.

Learning is still happening bottom-up: peer learning more than tripled year over year (from 24% to 80%), while taking recommendations from leadership dropped from 32% to 16%. Designers are figuring this out from each other vs from above.

The teams pulling ahead are the ones whose leaders accept that and build for it—creating conditions for tinkering, spotlighting employee-built tools in company forums, running hackathons, and protecting space to share workflows. This directly translates to employee satisfaction: Designers at companies with a culture of tinkering are 2x more likely to say they feel more creative and capable, even though they also face a higher bar.

Where this leaves designers

We believe it’s critically important that designers remain part of building software. Designers bring something unique to the table: user empathy, taste, an inherent sense of what to build and what not to build, delight, and the discipline to care about positive outcomes rather than just more software. As AI makes it easier for anyone to produce interfaces, that judgment becomes more valuable, not less.

Whether you’re a design leader making decisions on tooling and hiring, a designer thinking about how your craft should evolve, a founder trying to understand how AI is changing the way design gets done, or a student preparing for what’s next—we hope this report gives you something useful to work with.

We’d love to hear what you think.

We’re also publishing a series of case studies alongside it, with teams at the forefront of this shift: Anthropic, Framer, Linear, Notion, Shopify, Sierra, and Stripe. Each one looks at how a team is navigating these changes in practice. Sign up here to get them as they’re released.

Last year, we launched our first State of AI in Design report in partnership with Foundation Capital to cut through the noise and understand what’s really happening inside design teams. It became one of the most widely shared resources on AI’s impact on design work.

One year later, with the speed of AI innovation and breadth of new tools, most designers and design leaders are still navigating the same core questions: What does an effective AI-integrated workflow look like? What skills should I actually be learning? How should my team be structured?

That’s why we’re going deeper this year with our second annual State of AI in Design survey, to bring designers and design leaders concrete, usable answers.

The survey takes about 10 minutes. By completing it, you’ll be first in line for the findings and upcoming events, plus be entered to win an Oura Ring, Mac Mini, or B&W Px7 S3 headphones.

Take the survey

What survey participants get access to:

• Early access to survey findings, before they’re published publicly

• Case studies from AI-forward companies including real workflows and implementation case studies showing how leading teams actually get work done with AI

• Priority invitations to events including virtual workshops and in-person meetups

Here are some of the threads we’re pulling on in this research:

How are the best design teams using AI? Some teams have clearly moved past experimentation. We want to understand what their workflows look like and what they’re doing that others aren’t.

What can designers do now that wasn’t possible two years ago, and where does AI still fall short? The gap between idea and implementation is closing fast, but the output isn’t always good enough to use. We want to map both sides.

What does “AI-native designer” actually mean? Everyone’s using the phrase. Is it about tool fluency? Comfort with code? A fundamentally different design process? We want to pin this down with real data.

How is AI changing who gets hired, and for what? Are companies looking for different skills than they were two years ago? What’s happening with headcount? Are teams growing, shrinking, or being reshaped?

Where are organizational barriers the real bottleneck? A lot of the friction isn’t about the tools. It’s unclear policies, security concerns, lack of budget, or no permission to experiment. We want to understand how much of the slowdown is environment versus tooling.

Take the survey

This year’s report pairs survey data with video case studies from design leaders and founders reshaping how their teams work with AI - covering both the broader trends and the practical how-to’s.

If you’re a designer, design leader, or work closely with design teams, please take the survey and share it with your network. The more responses, the better the data.

- Designer Fund team

P.S. If you’re based in or heading to Austin for SXSW next week, we’re hosting an event on Saturday, March 14th alongside Framer and Foundation Capital! RSVP here.

Announcing Adora, a visual source of truth for product teams

We’re excited to back Adora, which maps end-to-end product experiences directly from production, in real time.

As companies scale, it becomes harder to maintain a shared, accurate picture of what users are experiencing live. Design files show one thing, production shows another, and decisions get made in that gap.

Adora’s co-founder and CEO Omar Salem felt this firsthand running growth at Canva across 100+ languages. His team’s Slack filled with questions no one could answer quickly: What’s the latest onboarding flow? What are users in our fastest-growing markets seeing right now? Beyond inefficiency, this meant the risk of multi-million dollar decisions being made without reliable ground truth.

Adora automatically maps live environments so screens and journeys stay current as teams ship. It flags friction points and broken flows, with session replays attached, so teams can see exactly where and why experiences break down.

As AI makes building easier and faster, understanding the experience people are actually having and making sure you’re building the right things (not all the things) become even more critical. That’s why we believe tools like Adora will become foundational.

Huge congrats to Omar and the Adora team on getting this out into the world. We’re excited for more teams to try it, and to build better products because of it.

Read Ben’s full announcement and try Adora here.

Leif Abraham on building Public: Emotional retention over features

Our latest Designer Founder interview features Leif Abraham, co-founder of Public, one of the fastest-growing brokerage platforms in the U.S.

After selling his previous company and years spent at design agencies, Leif helped scale Public from its roots in democratizing investing to a multi-asset platform serving millions across stocks, Treasury accounts, bonds, alternatives, and even AI-generated assets.

He walked us through what agency work taught him about building companies, why retention rooted in emotion outlasts feature-driven growth, and how Public thinks about its next chapter.

A few takeaways from our conversation:

• The “next feature” trap – Most teams believe the next big release will unlock durable growth. It rarely does. Leif focuses on “emotional retention” instead, designing a product people don’t just use, but genuinely defend.

• UX over UI – Sometimes the right move is making your product “less pretty.” Public deliberately shifted from lightweight to dense interfaces when they realized their best customers valued depth and reliability over visual simplicity.

• The dinner table test – A simple filter for any founder: Would you genuinely want to sit at a dinner table with your customers and enjoy the conversation? If you don’t like the people you’re building for, the long game becomes much harder.

Leif Abraham on Public's long game

Signals we’re watching

Here’s what our team is talking about these days, on Slack and beyond:

Ben sat down with Delphi to talk about Facebook’s early days, starting Designer Fund after recognizing Silicon Valley’s design gap, and how he’s built a career in spotting billion-dollar companies before anyone else.

Design hiring is up - not despite AI, but because of it. Figma’s latest study found 47% of hiring managers say demand for designers has increased, with our own portfolio data showing design job postings up 60% in 2025. The catch: 73% now require AI tool proficiency, and companies are prioritizing senior talent who can hit the ground running. Core skills like visual polish and systems thinking remain critical, but the bar for what “qualified” means keeps rising.

Design education deserves better. A look back at how design schools came to be, and what needs to change for today’s software-driven world.

OpenStudio’s founding designer Takashi Wickes designed a teapot end-to-end in a single day. By combining AI rendering with core design tools, the platform lets designers move from concept to packaging without tool-hopping.

Updates from Designer Fund companies

West Co. launched Tangle, a purpose discovery tool that uses AI to help users define life purposes and build supportive communities. Founded by Evan Sharp (Pinterest) and Biz Stone (Twitter), the company raised $29M in seed funding with an unusual approach: hiring a former head of the Unitarian Universalist church to help shape a product centered on meaning rather than engagement metrics.

Physical Intelligence raised over $1 billion at a $5.6 billion valuation to build general-purpose robotic foundation models. The company trains robots on tasks like folding clothes and peeling vegetables, developing models that transfer knowledge across different hardware platforms while prioritizing research over near-term commercialization.

Reflow launched as an intelligence platform for enterprise operations, raising $15M+ in seed funding. The platform analyzes how operational teams spend their time and surfaces areas for improvement - without requiring integrations, time tracking, or consultant-led implementations.

Netlify reached 10 million developers on its platform and marked the milestone with Netlify Capsules, an interactive experience builders can deploy and share.

August Health introduced August Intelligence, embedding AI throughout its senior living platform to surface relevant information for care teams.

Open design roles

Standout design roles from across our portfolio:

• Product Designer at August Health (Remote)

• Founding Designer at Pathos (San Francisco, CA)

• Marketing Designer at Ambrook (Multiple Locations, Remote)

• Product Design Manager at Gusto (Multiple Locations; Remote)

• Senior Product Designer & Researcher at Netlify (Remote)

• Senior UX Writer at DICE (Remote, UK)

• Product Designer, Issuing at Stripe (Remote, Canada)

• Brand Designer at Stripe (Toronto, Canada)

• Technical Design Recruiting Manager at Stripe (San Francisco, CA)

• Staff Product Designer at Mixmax (Remote)

• Staff Product Designer at Commure (Mountain View, CA)

• Senior Product Designer at Chromatic (Remote)

• Brand Design Lead at Tracksuit (Sydney, Australia)

• UX Research Intern Summer 2026 at Notion (San Francisco, CA)

Explore 1,000+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you’d like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

For more resources, job openings, and upcoming events, follow Designer Fund on X and LinkedIn. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe to get future editions:

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This year made one thing clear: when it’s easier than ever to generate functional software, what really differentiates companies is the experience they create and how well they meet the needs of the people they’re building for. As AI lowers the cost of building, design plays an even bigger role in standing out.

Across our portfolio, we’re seeing teams use design to push into new frontiers, close experience gaps, and create moments of clarity and delight. You can see it in Weavy’s node-based AI workflows, Framer’s ability to make complex layouts easy to build, Linear’s famously crisp workflows, and Copper’s beautifully engineered, battery-powered ovens. And most recently, Stripe City—the hand-built miniature world streamed live over Black Friday weekend—a perfect example of the ambition and craft that underpin why so many businesses trust Stripe.

Looking toward 2026, this continues to be the work we’re committed to: supporting founders who value design not as an aesthetic layer, but as a core part of company building. We’ll keep helping teams hire great designers, refine early product strategy, and tap into the collective wisdom of our community.

What our team is excited about as we head into the new year:

“There is still too much reliance on text input boxes and hoping a new / better model ‘fixes the interface gap’. I want to see more designers/builders prototyping different ways to get data and information into AI and better / more unique outputs. I also want to see more of the intersection between AI and the real world, not only software. Think: how might we apply this to healthcare, our environment, manufacturing, our food ecosystem, and more.”
- Ben Blumenrose, Managing Partner

“AI can do incredible things in theory, but it only matters if people and institutions can actually use it. I’m excited to support founders who think deeply about the world their products have to live in - from healthcare clinics and public systems, to our homes and schools. Those places are dense with constraints: institutional inertia, very real consequences for failure, folks who don’t have time to learn new software. I think design has a huge opportunity here to help the technology take root in a way that’s lasting and genuinely useful.”
- Robyn Park, Head of Platform

“I’m eager to see more innovative UX in complex, regulated domains like healthcare, financial services, and legal, where significant opportunities remain to reimagine antiquated experiences through AI-native solutions. I’m particularly interested in founders building full-stack services firms. The AI era creates a compelling structural opportunity for comprehensive service providers to achieve software-like unit economics while delivering domain-specific expertise.”
- Jackie Berardo, Principal

Celebrating Designer Founders

This fall, we hosted two gatherings for designers building the next wave of companies.

In San Francisco, we partnered with Figma for Designer Builder Night, featuring demos from the founders of Bezi, New Generation, and Phota Labs. In New York, we teamed up with AI Residency and Ambrook for a salon with the teams behind Anthropic, Interfere, and Pillowtalk—an evening focused on designing AI for trust, working within real constraints, and knowing when to embrace a bit of jank.

Alongside IRL events, we’ve continued to share conversations with designers building great companies here on Substack, over at Designer Founders.

Julie Zhuo, Co-founder of Sundial, on her second act

Julie needs no introduction. After spending 14 years at Facebook, having risen to VP of Product Design and written the best-selling Making of a Manager, she left to start a new company called Sundial. From the outside, it looked effortless. In reality, she often felt like an imposter.

In Ben’s interview with Julie, she shares how the transition from design leader to founder forced her to unlearn years of delegation and get back into the details. She also discovered something surprising: you can borrow ambition. Surrounding herself with people who dream bigger raised her own ceiling. She also lays out her framework on how to take the founder leap when you don’t know where to start.

“I think a lot of us confuse fear with preference. We tell ourselves we don’t want that life—the stress, the risk—but often it’s just fear.”

Read or watch the interview

Then to mark six months of Designer Founders, we looked across every interview to identify the most consistent patterns. The biggest one: being a founder is fundamentally different from being a designer. You’re not sketching interfaces or polishing interactions anymore, but the skills that make you a strong designer (understanding constraints, moving fast, knowing what to cut) are the same skills that make you a strong founder. Read the recap here.

Signals we’re watching

Here’s what our team is talking about these days, on Slack and beyond:

World-building as brand. For Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, the Stripe team built a miniature city built on an 8ft-long table and live streamed it, an unexpectedly charming way to spotlight the businesses on their platform.

Shared language as speed. Linear’s Yann-Edern Gillet says that teams are building a “Rosetta Stone” between design and engineering. With stronger shared models and translation tools, the wall fades, and execution gets faster and cleaner.

The next UI frontier is wide open. As more teams move beyond chat-based interfaces, we’re seeing a wave of experiments in AI-native UI, like autocomplete, node editors, and spatial interfaces.

The cost of hiring slow. Can Duruk’s interactive hiring pipeline calculator shows how quickly delays compound, especially for roles that directly impact revenue or product velocity.

When art collides with marketing. A case study by Ambrook’s creative director Ali Aas that details why performance marketing is increasingly a design problem.

Updates from Designer Fund companies

Weavy has joined Figma under a new brand, Figma Weave. Their node-based approach to AI image and video generation gives designers deeper control — letting them branch, remix, and refine outputs across multiple models.

New Generation introduced Kepler, an agentic e-commerce platform that helps brands serve both people and AI shoppers through conversational storefronts, AI-ready catalogs, and real-time insights.

Liftoff came out of stealth with a clear mission: help great people find the right opportunities through trusted connections. Looking to hire? Try Liftoff here.

Pequity has been acquired by ADP, bringing its compensation planning and execution platform into the company’s suite to strengthen comp cycle management for enterprise customers.

Previvor Edge launched a personalized cancer prevention and early detection program and raised $3.3M in pre-seed funding. The program is already in-network with multiple insurance carriers.

Visual Electric has joined Perplexity. The team will form the new Agent Experiences group, focused on building the next generation of creative AI tools.

Open design roles

Standout design roles from across our portfolio:

• Design Engineer at Ambrook (Multiple Locations; Remote)

• Senior Communications Designer at Commure (Bangladesh)

• Head of Product Design at DICE (London, UK)

• Creative Director at Elevate (Remote)

• Senior Product Designer at Adora (Australia)

• Staff Product Designer at Gusto (Multiple Locations)

• Design Engineer (Contract) at Notion (New York, NY)

• Director of Product Design at Omada Health (Remote)

• Head of Creative at Physical Intelligence (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Product Designer at Quanta (San Francisco, CA)

• Staff Content Designer, Payments at Stripe (Toronto, Canada)

• UX Researcher at Stripe (Multiple Locations)

• Senior Product Designer at Tracksuit (New Zealand)

• Principal Designer at Via (New York, NY)

• Video & Motion Design Principal at Via (New York, NY)

Explore 1,000+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you’d like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

For more resources, job openings, and upcoming events, follow Designer Fund on X and LinkedIn. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe to get future editions:

Subscribe now

Almost a year ago a friend and former Designer Fund founder sent me this email -

Ben — hope you’re stellar.

Lior, a guy used to work with at Fiverr has started a company that helps designers build AI workflows for their teams. They already have teams at NVIDIA and others using the tool.

Teaser deck here

Shout if you want the intro. I will likely invest myself.

Now, we see a lot of creative tools and my initial gut read was -

1. Oh man, not another AI design tool

2. 4 founders?!

3. Is Fiverr a great launchpad for a design tool?

However, this having come from a designer founder/friend I trust I decided to at least keep an open mind and see what they’d built.

And once I did that, my outlook changed completely (by the way, this is why we put such an emphasis on products/prototyping)

Weavy approached AI-powered visual design using a node-based UI, historically reserved for the most professional creative tools like Origami for UI or Nuke for visual effects. However I found their approach much more accessible than those tools while still being powerful and flexible. Here is my write-up of the product in the original investment memo -

Their product approach has 3 key features that make for a very powerful tool -

1. It is model agnostic / flexible - this means they actually allow you to use any model as it is released and even more so different models for different parts of the workflow. E.g. use a model that’s great for text layout and another that’s better for photography for a different part of a composition or design.

2. It exposes process - this is a big deal and why I find Weavy so compelling. By exposing the process it lets you know how people are doing the work they do and easily lets you modify it for your own needs. This makes the tool more usable for a wider range of designers/animators/creatives and makes community more powerful as a shared file is way more usable.

3. It works as an aggregator - one thing I heard from the early users is how much they were bouncing between various tools to do their work. This brings all the workflows into one space - and more importantly into one subscription.

Also worth noting that of the four founders, two have design/creative backgrounds: Jonathan Gur-Zeev used to work as an animator and Itay Schiff was also a VFX artist, creative director, and ran a motion graphics studio. Weavy is as “designer-founded” as they come.

So we wrote the check and got to work, supporting them in all things product, design, and GTM, especially given the product is geared at designers..

Over the last 11 months, the Weavy team blew me away on so many levels:

They shipped extremely quickly.

They engaged their community and elevated anyone that was doing interesting work on the platform.

They took feedback well and used data to understand their shortcomings

They worked their butts off (my WhatsApp thread with Lior has messages early in the morning, late at night, and everything in between)

But most importantly, they built a product that people love and that solves a real pain point: letting people do high quality design work with the speed and scale they never could have imagined.

It is not surprising then that Figma + Weavy is a match made in heaven.

Dylan and the Figma team have built an extraordinary creative tools company that is loved by millions of people. Their mission of making design accessible to everyone is perfectly aligned with Weavy’s ethos and they have incredible resources to help Weavy scale and maintain a high product bar.

We couldn’t have imagined a better partner.

While I’m bummed that we won’t be working together as closely anymore I’m excited for what the future brings for the Weavy team and can’t wait to see how the product evolves over the coming years.

Congrats to Lior, Jonathan G., Jonathan A., Itay and the rest of the Weavy team.

We wish you nothing but success in the next phase of your journey!

Creating urgency around your fundraise this fall

We’re in the thick of fall fundraising season, one of the most active periods in venture capital.

One thing we’ve noticed in almost every successful raise is a founder who has created an incredible sense of urgency, both with their existing investors and the new folks they’re talking to.

People are in town, focused, and decisions move faster - use the season to your advantage. Your goal is to make every investor feel they’re part of a coordinated campaign, not individual conversations scattered across months. Think of it like everyone being in a room together, focused day in and day out on this raise.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

• Regular updates at least 1-2x a week once the raise is in full swing

• Get intros and support from existing investors

• Create a war room atmosphere - imagine if all your supporters were in a room, focused on this raise. Make progress visible and maintain regular communication

• Consider an ongoing email thread or even creating a WhatsApp or Slack channel with all the investors to help coordinate

• Create accountability for yourself and your investors. Recognize when goals and milestones are reached. Thank people when they help

Most importantly: speed matters. How quickly you respond to emails and get back to investors signals how seriously you’re taking the process. Treat it like a product launch with a deadline and a drumbeat.

Looking for more fundraising support? We’ve also published guides on how to design a winning pitch deck and how to design your fundraising process.

Latest from Designer Founders

We’ve continued to share interviews with designers building great companies here on Substack over at Designer Founders.

Evan Sharp, Co-founder of West Co.

“One of the superpowers of design is creating desire. With design, you can refine something you’re in love with, and it develops a gravity. People start to show up out of nowhere to work on it because it has this draw, this pull.”

Evan reflects on what he would do differently in building Pinterest, the business value of caring, and how design creates gravity around new ideas. His new company West Co. harnesses the power of congregation to rebuild human connection that’s been lost in our digital age.

→ Read the interview

Jeff Anders, Co‑founder of Ambrook

“I’m really drawn to legacy spaces. Farming, manufacturing, trucking, construction. People aren’t doing things the way their parents did, and design can help them adapt.”

Jeff shares how Ambrook built a company where everyone thinks like a designer, finding competitive advantage in underserved industries and building trust with rural communities. It’s a case study on design-first company building and how design shows up across brand, product, culture, and community.

→ Read the interview

Signals we’re watching

Here’s what our team is talking about these days, on Slack and beyond:

Design Hiring Resource Library. ICYMI, we published a comprehensive collection of resources from last month’s design hiring workshop: recording, slides, interview frameworks, sourcing channels, and more for early-stage teams.

The art of prototyping. “Prototyping biases towards action and feasibility over UX theater,” writes David Hoang. “The act of making and putting things together naturally exposes opportunity areas to improve. It collapses the distance between idea and impact.”

Computational taste. An exploration by Amber Atherton on how LLMs might develop aesthetic judgment, and what that means for designers and builders working with AI tools.

Linear’s product culture. A deep dive from a few years ago on how Linear’s engineering and product teams get work done, maintaining quality and velocity at scale.

Cheeky Pint with Ambrook. John Collison sits down with Mackenzie Burnett of Ambrook to discuss American agriculture, labor and immigration challenges, building rural resilience, ERPs, and the principle of money movement.

Updates from Designer Fund companies

Operate launched its CRM designed for sales, built for founders. The team is bringing thoughtful design to sales tools that have traditionally felt bloated and confusing.

Copper raised a $28M Series A to make home decarbonization simple, beautiful, and lovable. They’re making battery-equipped appliances that help households cut their carbon footprint without sacrificing performance or aesthetics.

Euclid Power closed a $20M Series A to accelerate renewable energy projects. The funding will help scale their platform that makes it faster and easier for developers to navigate the complex permitting and interconnection processes slowing down clean energy deployment.

Framer raised $100M in Series D funding at a $2 billion valuation. They’ve become the standard for professional web design, combining powerful design tools with production-ready code to help companies build and run better sites.

Stripe launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and released the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard codeveloped with OpenAI.

Open design roles

• Motion Designer at Air (New York, NY)

• Design Engineer at Ambrook (New York, Denver, San Francisco)

• Experiential Marketing Manager at August Health (Remote)

• Brand Designer at Copper (Berkeley, CA)

• Head of Brand Studio at Gusto (Multiple Locations)

• Staff Product Designer at Gusto (Multiple Locations)

• Product Design Lead at Haven (San Francisco, CA)

• Graphic Illustrator at Mental (Remote)

• Senior Content Designer at Omada Health (Remote)

• Senior Product Designer at Quanta (San Francisco, CA)

• Lead Product Designer at Rodeo (New York, San Francisco)

• Frontend Senior Software Engineer at Siteline (San Francisco, CA)

• Design Director, Experiential at Stripe (New York, NY)

Explore 1,000+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you’d like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

For more resources, job openings, and upcoming events, follow Designer Fund on X and LinkedIn. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe to get future editions:

Subscribe now

It’s one of the most common questions we get from the early-stage founders we work with. We’ve written about when and what to look for in a founding designer, but what are the specific tactics for attracting, sourcing, and closing them?

So we hosted a virtual session to tackle the nuts and bolts of design hiring in 2025. Nearly 1,000 people signed up, which should tell you something about how high the demand is for design talent right now.

The takeaway: the problem isn’t necessarily a lack of talented designers. It’s that market dynamics have shifted. AI has raised the baseline for product quality, big companies and startups are competing for increasingly similar profiles, and the hiring playbooks that worked even two years ago need updating.

Here’s the recording of the session:

View the deck in Figma Slides here (🪄pro tip: consider adding a comment to the “Classifieds” slide on slide 59 to get connected with designers or founders, whether you’re hiring or looking.)

For those who want to go deeper, we’ve put together a Design Hiring Resource Library with examples of effective job descriptions, hiring-related artifacts, a framework for evaluating skills, and tactics for every stage of the process.

Access the Resource Library

The full resources cover a lot of ground, but if you’re short on time, here are the key lessons every founder should know when hiring their early designers:

1. The reality of competing for top designers

Hiring a great designer has never been quick or easy for most startups. But it’s doubly harder now, with demand for designers surging as AI accelerates product building. At the same time, both large and early stage companies are chasing an increasingly similar profile: full-stack designers with strong visual craft, business understanding, and the ability to design with and for AI.

This means the best designers have their pick of opportunities and likely more leverage than you.

Expect the process to take time. Be ready for outreach, follow-ups, rigorous back-channeling, and reviewing many portfolios. If designers aren’t knocking down your door, you need to be actively selling your vision.

The founders who consistently win top design talent start early and build relationships before they’re desperate. Check in via text as your product evolves. Hop on a plane to meet them in person. Host a small dinner for designers (this is how Faire hired their second designer).

When you find someone who could change your company’s trajectory, don’t hold back. Show genuine excitement. Involve your team so they can see the caliber of colleagues they’d be joining. Ask for their feedback on your product.

Also, don’t underestimate compensation as a signal. If you’re paying your founding designer significantly less than your engineers, you’re inadvertently telling them how much you value design. Pay them comparably to show you see design as equally critical.

2. Attract designers through design

Great designers gravitate toward companies that already show they value design. Saying “we have nothing yet” is not a selling point. They want evidence that the founder and team care about design so they can picture how their work would push things further.

Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp put it perfectly in our recent interview: “One of the superpowers of design is creating desire. With design, you can refine something you’re in love with, and it develops a gravity. People start to show up out of nowhere to work on it because it has this draw.” This gravitational pull extends beyond users to the designers you want to hire.

Designer Founders

The Anti-Silicon Valley Playbook: Evan Sharp on Following Love Over Logic

Evan joined our design team at Facebook in 2009. One of my first memories is him asking if he could keep working on a side project. We told him, “your whole life is about to be consumed by working here, but if you want to find time on nights and weekends, by all means…

Read more

a year ago · 19 likes · Ben Blumenrose

You can do this in plenty of ways: share early brand or product artifacts (the team at Operate does this well), make it clear in your JD why design is important to your company, or spin up a Notion page that shows how design fits into the way you work. The point is to consistently signal that design matters.

But the one thing that kept coming up when we asked designers what they look for: a strong marketing site.

“The best thing I used wasn’t an AI tool or a recruiter, it was hiring a great designer to rebuild our website,” said one founder. “It told the world we care about design without me saying it in a job description. Designers saw it and thought, ‘If I join, my work will be prioritized and held to a high bar.’” After countless tactics and reviewing hundreds of portfolios, redesigning the site finally unlocked interest from top design candidates and helped them land a founding designer.

There’s really no excuse today for having a poor marketing site. With tools like Framer and accessible design agencies, what used to be a differentiator is now table stakes. It’s far too easy for people to assume you don’t value design if your site is mediocre.

Founders often frame this as a chicken-and-egg problem: how can you attract designers through design if you don’t have one yet? The answer is simple. Tap into the ecosystem. Work with freelancers and agencies. Bring on a fractional designer for a few months. You want to demonstrate that design is important enough for you to invest in from day one, even without full-time hire.

3. Mine your own network, then expand

The best place to start is your own network, then your team’s and investors’. But don’t just blast out “know any designers?” emails. Frame the ask so people can picture the right profile: independent IC, strong visual craft, early-stage appetite. Track referrals systematically in a spreadsheet with names, status, notes. Consider running a “sourceathon” where the whole team spends an hour combing through alumni groups, social feeds, and communities to drop names into a shared doc.

Once you’ve gone through the obvious circles, expand to less crowded ponds. Some of the strongest designers didn’t study design at all. They came from front-end engineering, film, or economics, and built their design careers by making and shipping. Others are juniors emerging from top programs like RISD, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford d.school - or skipping school entirely and building/sharing great work online.

Don’t limit your search by geography either. There are deep pools of design talent in places like Toronto (e.g. Flo Guo, founding designer of Paradigm), Austin (e.g. Phi Hoang, who’s behind Perplexity’s brand experience), as well as across Europe and India. We tend to recommend that early teams work together in person, but if your company is remote-friendly, this dramatically broadens the funnel.

One more tip: reverse-engineer the products you admire. If you love using Linear, Granola, or another tool, figure out who designed it and reach out to them, even for referrals to other designers they know.

4. The new bar for early design talent

Startups need designers who can handle chaos - comfortable with ambiguity, moving quickly without direction, resilient under pressure. But the bar has gotten higher.

You want designers who operate across the full spectrum: strong visual skills, systems thinking, and a clear line of sight between their work and business results. They iterate in hours instead of weeks and are already experimenting with AI tools to ship faster. As one founder put it, “If I ask a designer whether they’ve tried Claude Artifacts or prototyping with AI and they show zero interest, that’s a red flag.”

Most importantly, they balance craft with speed. They want to ship high-quality work but understand especially at the pre-PMF stage, that prototyping and iterating quickly is crucial. They know when an extra week of polish matters and when it doesn’t.

Go beyond polished portfolios (some of the best designers don’t keep updated ones). Ask to see work-in-progress or have them walk through something in Figma. You’ll learn more from how they discuss tradeoffs than from perfectly put-together case studies.

Pay attention to their questions too. “What does your design system look like?” suggests someone better suited for later stage. “What’s the biggest user problem you’re not solving?” - now you’re getting somewhere.

5. Get references earlier than you think

Get references early in the process, sometimes even before a phone screen.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Many founders hiring a designer for the first time don’t have a strong sense of how to evaluate candidates. You may not know what a good portfolio looks like or how to interpret case studies. Talking to someone who has worked closely with the candidate as a designer can give you a more grounded perspective.

References also help close the gap between how someone interviews and how they work day to day. It’s easy to be influenced by a polished presentation, but that doesn’t always translate to execution. Ask the people they’ve worked with simple, direct questions: Would you work with them again? Where did they stand out? How did they contribute to the team?

Pay close attention to the tone of the response. Real enthusiasm usually comes through. Anything less than a clear “yes” should make you cautious. If a reference says something like “incredible designer, but people struggled to work with them,” treat that as a stop sign. That one call can save you from making the wrong hire.

Hiring great designers takes patience, but getting the fundamentals right - showing you value design, building relationships early, evaluating for the right skills - will put you ahead of most founders who are winging it.

Explore our Design Hiring Resource Library for more tactics and examples, as well as the slide deck from our recent virtual event on the topic.

More resources for founders and designers

• If you’re a founder who deeply values design and are raising, we’d love to hear from you. Refer yourself here.

• If you’re a designer who’s looking for a role, join our talent network or check out our job board for open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies

• If you’re a founder or hiring manager, we recommend that you check out Liftoff, a referral-driven hiring platform with deep networks in design, product, and marketing. They’ve helped companies like Loom and Ramp make exceptional design hires. Join the waitlist here and mention Designer Fund to skip the line.

About Designer Fund

​​Designer Fund invests early in companies that use design to improve health, sustainability, and prosperity for all people. We provide founders with expertise on hiring and managing design teams, product and brand advice, and designer professional development with our community of design leaders. We’ve backed exceptional companies like Stripe, Gusto, Notion, Framer, Commure, and Netlify.

Virtual workshop: How to hire a top designer

If you’ve been on Design Twitter recently, you’ve probably seen it: *everyone* seems to be talking about hiring designers.

The market is flush with opportunities yet frustratingly slow-moving for both founders/hiring managers and designers. Why is hiring so hard right now, and what do we do about it?

We’re hosting a virtual session this Thursday to help early-stage teams hire with more clarity and speed. We’ll cover how to define what you need in a designer, where to find them, how to evaluate fit, and how to signal that you truly value design (hint: avoid the below).

Register here to join the event this Thursday, August 28th at 11AM pacific.

RSVP for the workshop

Latest from Designer Founders

We’ve continued to share interviews with designers building great companies here on Substack over at Designer Founders.

Jessica Hische, Co-founder of Studioworks

“I make sure that even if I’m using AI to help prototype or test textures, ultimately I feel like I have the most control over the final output of the work.”

Jessica is bringing the same hands-on rigor and independence that defines her legendary lettering career to building software for creatives with Studioworks. She and her co-founders chose to bootstrap, declining VC funding in favor of autonomy and a slower, more intentional growth path.

→ Read the interview.

Cecilia Uhr, Co-founder of Bezi

“Startups are always operating under conditions of extreme constraints. Differentiating between deal-breakers and nice-to-haves is a muscle designers need to build to be able to ship fast and iterate.”

Cecilia shares lessons in building under constraints, tracing her path from designing at agencies to building at Oculus to starting a company. She emphasizes that for AI startups, brand and storytelling are how you build trust and stand out in a crowded space.

→ Read the interview.

Al Hertz, Founding Designer at Plaid + Co-founder of Folio

“Service is when something is happening to you—hospitality is when something feels like it’s happening for you. Great design is when something is done so well that it feels like it was made exactly for you, even though it’s designed for millions.”

At Folio, Al is applying this philosophy to supplier management for hotels, proving that even the most utilitarian software can feel personal and delightful. On deciding what to build, his advice is to “find something that plays to your unique strengths.”

→ Read the interview.

Designer Founders

Inspiring more designers to take the leap of entrepreneurship.

By Designer Fund

Signals we’re watching

Here’s what our team is talking about these days, on Slack and beyond:

What’s in a label? Some argue that we should stop calling designers “designers” altogether, since many of the best product builders today are just people who can make and ship things, regardless of title. On the other hand, labels like designer founder can create visibility, signal intent, and help others recognize a path they might not have seen.

Founder mode for designers. Ben shared his thoughts on how to apply a founder’s mindset to whatever you're building, whether it’s inside a company or as a side project. He points to examples like Rasmus Andersson’s Inter typeface, the Analog Research Lab at Facebook, and Jessica Hische’s progression from lettering to launching startups. Treat your work like it matters at scale, even if it doesn’t yet.

AI dev tools burning cash? Nick Baumann shared a breakdown on why many AI coding tools lose money: fixed-revenue, variable-cost pricing tied to expensive inference. The sustainable path looks more like open-source harnesses, usage-based pricing, and not reselling compute.

Facebook Design circa 2009. This talk from Facebook’s earlier days is a great articulation of how strong design teams operate: “We believe great products come from moving fast, sharing often, and shipping your own work.”

Updates from Designer Fund companies

August Health raised a $29 million Series B to expand its senior living platform and launch new AI-powered care tools. Having prioritized design from day one, the company applies strong product thinking to systems that need it—in this case, helping care teams extend quality of life for an aging population.

Euclid Power was named to the Building for Better list for making it faster and easier to deploy renewable energy projects.

Adora made The Generalist’s Future 50 list, joining the ranks of top high-potential startups globally with a valuation under $200 million. It’s also the first Australian company to make the list.

Weavy’s Vibeathon is open through August 31, calling for bold, emotionally resonant submissions across product, design, film, and more; Framer’s hackathon with Contra invites inventive Workshop components, with $10,000 in prizes and a September 1 deadline.

Open design roles

• Senior Product Designer at Air (New York, NY)

• Brand Designer at Copper (Berkeley, CA)

• Founding Designer at Dupe (New York, NY)

• Senior Staff UX Researcher at Gusto (Multiple Locations)

• Founding Designer at Interfere (New York, San Francisco)

• Design Engineer at Linear (Remote in Europe, North America)

• Staff Product Designer at Mixmax (Remote in Europe, Latam)

• Staff Brand Designer at Netlify (Remote)

• UX Writer at Notion (New York, San Francisco)

• Design Director, Experiential at Stripe (Multiple Locations)

• Design Recruiter at Stripe (Multiple Locations)

• Product Designer at Quanta (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Designer at Wayfinder (Remote)

Featured role: Copper is on a mission to make home decarbonization simple and beautiful, starting with a new category of battery-equipped appliances. They're hiring a Brand Designer in Berkeley to bring that vision to life across every touchpoint, from web pages to decks to physical products. You’ll collaborate with the team to evolve a visual language that bridges brand and product in a deeply intentional, hands-on way.

Explore 800+ open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies on our job board or forward this post to someone who’s looking.

And if you'd like to work with founders and companies where design is central to their success, join our talent network to get on our radar for future opportunities.

Join our talent network

We’re always excited to meet founders who put design at the core of what they’re building. If someone comes to mind, reply to this email—we’d love to connect.

For more resources, job openings, and upcoming events, follow Designer Fund on X and LinkedIn. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe to get future editions:

Subscribe now