Silicon Valley's New Secret Weapon: Designers Who Found Startups. For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers.
But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, it’s harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies. This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact.
My solution? Why Can’t Startups Find Designers? Maybe it was Apple’s emphasis on design, and its direct impact on the iPhone and iPad’s success.
Maybe it was the success of design-heavy startups like Airbnb and Hipmunk. Or maybe, as startups mature technologically, people are realizing that design can become a valuable differentiator. In any case, during the past couple years it seems like the tech world has gradually come to realize the importance of design. As a sign of this trend, there’s even a fund that exclusively backs startups founded by designers.
Tooltips.php?q=startupteam. Silicon Valley's New Secret Weapon: Designers Who Found Startups.