

The Designer Fund will invest in startups where the founders are designers - thankuz
http://www.thedesignerfund.com/

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sgdesign
As a designer, I have to say this is great news. But it's probably easier to
build a startup as a programmer with no design experience than as a designer
with no development experience.

So it will be interesting to see how the funded companies manage to actually
build their product.

~~~
phlux
Actually, I think this is fantastic due to the fact that there are brilliant
designers with great ideas - and while it was hard to find developers to
become technial co-founders with simply a design - now they can show they have
some funding which may push the devs over the cliff.

Further - it would be interesting if the fund adds development resources to
the offering.

For example - they could hire full time devs to help the funded designers get
prototypes up and running in lieu of further cash.

This would be a great type of incubator who works as an enabling tech
boutique.

~~~
sgdesign
But for me the key question is – as a designer, how will you convince
investors to fund you? With just an idea? With your portfolio? With a business
plan and strategy?

~~~
phlux
Well, since that is just a landing page, and appears to be founded by one of
the guys behind 500 startups -- I think i will be a matter of having a good
idea, having a sound design for implementing that idea and getting them to
believe that if you were empowered with funding you could see that idea, based
on your design developed.

I belive that having a good idea/design and the credibility of some funds
behind you, you should be able to pay/convince a tach co-founder to work with
you.

What would really be of value, as I mentioned, would be if this incubator
provided you with some development hours. Further it would be great if they
provided good development estimations based on your design.

So then they could say "You idea and design should cost about $XXX to get it
to stage 1 2 or 3"

Stages 1 2 and 3 being, MVP, Beta, Market respectively.

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spencerfry
Carbonmade was started by my co-founder and designer, Dave Gorum. Harvest, a
startup also in our building in NYC, was founded by two designers as well.
It's fairly common in NYC.

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quique
Thank you all for the comments, questions, and feedback... it's not about me,
Dave McClure, any individual designer in residence or even 500 Startups, it's
about creating an ecosystem of great designer founders and designers with
specialized talent in the startup game.

And we want more but the startup designer path is broken. Just look at the
thousands of responses on Quora for hints... I don’t even have to ask and bet
that many of your companies are looking to hire a designer.... but the problem
is, designers are being taught outdated education, not being mentored by other
startup designers, and there’s intense competition. If you think the problem
is bad here, it gets worse globally.

We see this trend growing as more consumer startups are succeeding because of
replicable methods for great core product idea discovery and continuously well
executed user experience, not just pretty pixels. In fact we’ve invested in a
number designer founders including Votizen’s Jason Putorti, ColourLovers (also
YC), WorkersNow, Slideshare, Forrst, Foodspotting, Punchd, MotionMath,
Visual.ly...

So the question is how do we create more designers like Jason Putorti, who not
only have the more traditional visual ability to make things look pretty, but
more importantly have the engineering and development skillz along with
business sense to effectively launch startups and be successful.

This begs the follow up question, so where do these great designers go? Many
of my top designer friends are at agencies and big tech companies where they
hone their craftsmanship and are respected. However, too few take the leap to
venture out on their own and become founders/leaders, even when they get
frustrated being mercenaries and trading their time for cash that doesn’t
scale...but some actually risk leaving the cush job...

Like consultants from Adaptive Path. On their website they actually embrace
designers like Jeff Veen who sold his company to Google and Ryan Freitas one
of our mentors, who sold his company to AOL. So how can we create an
environment for folks like this to take the entrepreneurial leap...

They can take The d.fund path. We aim to remove this activation barrier with
hand pick designers from top schools, tech companies, freelancers, even
globally, to help foster a new generation of designer founders. In the process
we also will create more designers available for hire and develop specialized
design consulting for startups as a means to train and stay alive, not an end.

We’ve been growing up & to the right with hand picked and filtered designers
by being radically collaborative with other groups and internally teaching our
own design bootcamp and curriculum inspired by the Stanford dschool, Janice
Fraser’s LUXr and the whole lean startup movement. We also plan to host an
even better WarmGun conference to bring together more designers and developers
later this year in NYC...

More top designers are joining our community everyday because it’s not about
Dave, me or any one designer in residence...it’s about a scalable designer
ecosystem that is committed to helping produce designers that solve meaningful
problems in our world, not one trick ponies & pseudo attention sucking
innovation...

Many of you may have seen the YC post that got thousands of views about how
it’s like the Marines...which makes me wonder what happens when you combine an
empathetic Jedi Designer with an elite Marine Hacker...I think you get an
amazing force of real innovation....

So, help create the best path for startup designers by joining us and not just
investing at least $50k in a designer founder to participate in our next
accelerator batch in Mid May, but more importantly... provide the education,
mentorship & especially engineering skills to make the startup designer
ecosystem healthy & sustainable...

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random42
How about funding where founders (3) are

1\. understands/responsible for design.

2\. understands/responsible for technology development.

3\. understands/responsible for business development.

Edit - I personally do not agree to have _artificial_ requirements of "one
founder must be designer" or such sorts (including the above mentioned) for
creating innovating/successful startups.

~~~
alsomike
Could you explain the difference between "understands design" and being a
designer?

~~~
phlux
I like the color green.

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simonsarris
What's the definition of a designer?

I am a recent CS grad who is making an HTML5 Canvas games site in my spare
time. I'm doing everything myself so it is taking a long time.

I have never used Ruby or Rails before this project. I only recently learned
Canvas and Javascript.

I have however done site design before and done art all my life. I am probably
going to end up doing the layout of my site as well as all the artwork for (at
least) the first game.

Am I a designer?

~~~
bluekeybox
If you are a designer, you know it. Doesn't hold the other way though
("knowing" is required but not sufficient).

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kadavy
I think it's great to encourage designers to be founders. The arguments
against commodification of design (i.e. crowdsourcing) usually include that it
"devalues design."

I think more designers should take advantage of the incredible value they can
create – practically for free – by being entrepreneurs instead; instead of
worrying about clients that "don't understand the value of good design."

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geoffw8
Very good idea. I'm starting to really see the meaning behind "all you need is
an angle". I guess you can recycle virtually anything.

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gallerytungsten
Sounds great, but I'd really like to more information and some demonstration
of value before I sign up for some email list.

The language of the signup page, "Sign up if you want to help" also seems
aimed more at people who want to help them, rather than designers who want to
get funded.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
I couldn't agree more. Without a tangible list of how I could even possibly be
benefited, you probably are not getting my email. Even just telling me your
going to send out newsletters would be enough.

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niico
This is a great idea. We designers are very confident about creating,
designing and executing an idea with a great visual look and user experience
not so much build it. So this will be a great opportunity to fund beautiful
looking projects.

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alaithea
They'd be better off rephrasing the question on the front page "what do these
companies have in common" to "what do these products have in common." Android
is not a company.

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siavosh
At a cursory look, this reminds me of the hedge fund-of-funds (right before
the big bust) that marketed itself as only investing in funds that were
managed by women.

~~~
ScotterC
To my knowledge that's still around. I've heard that the prominent reason some
funds tout themselves as woman-led is because some studies showed that women
tended to get consistent although smaller returns then men-led funds. Had to
do with not taking big risks and making more calculated decisions. This is all
anecdotal of course.

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jonmc12
From whois - Enrique Allen registered domain. According to his linkedin /
crunchbase profile he is a Stanford researcher / TA, and founding member 500
startups. Sounds interesting.

Also, [http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/06/500-startups-designer-
fund...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/06/500-startups-designer-fund/)

Edit: thanks for correction. Sincere apologies for silly oversight.

~~~
alabut
Enrique = he. And he is cool - he's the designer-in-residence at 500 Startups
and a very chill guy to talk to.

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wardandrews
When the founder starts with an innovation in user experience, good things
usually happen.

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erik_p
I assume this means product designers and is not explicitly just for graphic
designers.

graphic design != product design

I'm excited about this fund, unless they are just looking for graphic artist
founders explicitly.

