Ben Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund, they invest in startups co-founded by designers and build and educate design teams through their program, Bridge. Designer Fund's portfolio includes the likes of Gusto, Stripe, Shyp, Operator and many more incredible companies. As for Ben, previously Ben was a design lead at Facebook for over 5 years where he helped build products for nearly a billion people and grow Facebook's world-class design team. He was also the design director at Varien which he helped build into one of the world's leading e-commerce firms.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ben made the move from designer to General Partner @ Designer Fund?
2.) How does Ben's design background inform how he invests in companies and then supports them post-investment? How does he evaluate design opportunities from the design perspective?
3.) Why now has design become such a competitive advantage in tech? What has changed? What are the fundamentals of beautifully designed products today?
4.) How does Ben believe the current crop of VCs view design? What do they not understand? What should they look to understand? Will we see a new class of design-centric VCs?
5.) From seeing the likes of Facebook, Medium and Asana scale deign teams, what have been the takeaways to effectively scaling design teams with the growth of an organisation? What is required for this to be successful?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Ben's Fave Book: The Power of One
Ben's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Social Snippets, Charles Hudson @ Precursor
Ben's Most Recent Investment: Hustle
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