We’re a community of designers who invest in designer founders through mentorship, funding, and access to our network. Designers can apply for an investment, then our community will evaluate and select applicants to invest in. We are NOT another incubator. Instead, we help match designer founders with mentors, angels, accelerators, seed funds and later stage VCs.
Our sponsoring partners include top tier investors such as Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, 500 Startups, KKLD, Venture51 and Quest Venture Partners.
Designers whose success in business generates meaningful impact (positive social impact at scale), particularly through the use of new IT experiences. Every six months we look to invest in a balanced mix of designers across three stages: prototype, alpha and beta. We're focusing on designer founders primarily based in Silicon Valley but we're open to those located in other major metropolitan and startup hubs.
This is a non-profit book of 35+ rare personal interviews with the founders of tech-startups who have various design backgrounds such as Chad Hurley (YouTube), David Karp (Tumblr), Matt Shobe (Feedburner), Caterina Fake (Flickr) . . .
FastCoDesign wrote earlier this year about a new VC model, called the Designer Fund, a community of designers that invest in designer founders. The point is not to get caught up in titles and challenge the role of founders with engineering backgrounds but to highlight the emerging opportunity for founders with design expertise. . . .
Our founders, mentors and angels range from early stage designers at YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to designers at IDEO, Cooper, Jump Associates, Frog and Method to current designers at startups like Path and Flipboard. We're putting our money and attention where our mouth is to help designers make startups that people actually want to use.